Jade: Links inside a paragraph

I'm trying to author a few paragraphs with Jade, but finding it difficult when there are links inside a paragraph.

The best I can come up with, and I'm wondering if there's a way to do it with less markup:

p
  span.
   this is the start
   of the para.
  a(href="http://example.com") a link
  span.
    and this is the rest of
    the paragraph.