Billy Bob Walker Got Married (32 page)

"I won't be the only one thinkin' it," Ellen returned with regret.

"I can't help that. She was mine first. She's mine now." "And it's that easy for you to forget the time she spent with him?"

"Mama." She looked up at last, her busy, worried hands stilling on the fruit. "She's never slept with him."

Ellen's face flushed a dark red, and her mouth primmed at his blunt outspokenness.

"Did I ask to know that?"

"No. But you needed to hear it, didn't you? And I needed to say it."

"Did she tell you she hadn't?"

"Maybe there wasn't any need. For one thing, I think I would have married her, anyway. I love her, Mama."

"Don't sell your soul and ruin your life for love, boy. I couldn't bear it."

"
Your
mother was a gullible fool.
" Sewell’s callow, vindictive words sluiced through him like scalding bleach, searing his insides. I hate him, Billy thought, looking down at his mother's pleading face . . . then he shook himself away from the thought. "We're free to be what we can be." Shiloh said that.

"She was a virgin, Mama. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. I was there. I know."

"Oh." Her word was a whispered, flustered moue of sound. Embarrassed, surprised, relieved.

It was Grandpa who broke the awkward silence. "I didn't know they still made them," he said wryly. "Trust you, Billy Bob, to find the last one in the state."

"She's not going to like it that I told you."

"We're not likely to bring it up over the supper table," Ellen retorted with a stab of tartness. "And I don't see that it means a thing, at least, not in some ways. She's still the daughter of a rich man."

"A rich,
mean
one," Grandpa interpolated.

"I don't care," Billy said stubbornly. "She stood up for me at the jail. She's the reason they let me go. There's enough between us that this can work. I had to try. And right now, she's scared to death. I reckon she's back there at the house crying. She sure looked like she was about to." He remembered uneasily the lost, empty look on her face.

"We ain't gonna bite her," said Grandpa, a little indignantly.

"I told her she could take the bedroom off the kitchen. The one that nobody ever uses." He tried to say it diffidently, without showing how the words rankled, looking down the long row of pecan trees that ran beyond the stand.

There was a tiny silence of surprise. "What's wrong with yours?"

Billy Bob frowned at Willie. Did the old man never show any tact at all? "She likes that room. Nobody says I won't stay there with her, do they? But maybe she needs some time on her own, a place of her own for a few days." His heavy shoulders—too wide for the lankiness of his body—heaved upward, shrugging off the surprised, then pitying, looks of his relatives.

"Don't be a fool, boy." His grandfather levered himself up out of the slat-backed rocking chair, rearing up on the cane to stand pugnaciously before Billy. "You already got two strikes against you with this marriage. If you aim to hold the thing together, you better use any kind of glue you can. You've been keepin' that Blake woman happy for years with just one thing, and she's mighty near an expert on it, I hear. So you better try some of it on this new wife. Don't let her scare you off."

"Daddy!"

"Truth is truth, Ellen."

"I'm
not
scared."

Willie turned from his belligerent stance toward his daughter and focused his wisdom firmly on his recalcitrant grandson.

"Sure you are. This wife of yours is pretty. Fancy. You said yourself you've been thinkin' about her for a long time. And on top of all that, she's what we used to call a good woman. They're the scariest kind, boy, especially when you love them. Pure hell on a man. He's always trying to deserve em."

"You'd think he was some kind of expert on women, wouldn't you?" Billy said in exasperation to the sky.

And unexpectedly, Ellen chuckled, her hands moving again, like bumblebees over sweet purple clover as she stacked apples into fat, red potbellied piles. "He reads
Cosmopolitan
every time we have to stand in line at the Bi-Rite. And I guess she can have that room if she wants it. You should remember, Daddy, it's got two doors, one to the inside hall, and one to the outside porch. Surely to goodness Will can talk his way into one or the other of them. He's
your
grandson."

She was asleep when he went back to the house at lunch, lying sideways, nearly turned on her stomach in the middle of the patchwork quilt, the bright blue dress tangling around her long brown legs.

Billy's heart turned over, one, good solid flip, as he stood silently in the door watching his young bride sleep. Her thick, waving dark hair spread like a heavy fan over the quilt and the edge of the pillow, sweeping off the rich healthy brown of her tanned forehead, leaving the clean line of her profile clear to his view. One downy, soft tuft of new growth lay against her temple, clinging damply to her skin, its dark silkiness echoed by the long sweep of the eyelashes on her flushed cheeks. It was too warm in the little room in spite of the long row of windows she'd pushed up.

One hand was up under her, her fingers long and slender at the edge of her body, right where the buttons of the blue dress had opened, as if beckoning him. The palm of her hand pressing against her heart pushed her breasts upward; the shadows between them were rich and dusky.

If she hadn't been so nervy this morning, if Grandpa and Mama weren't coming to the house for lunch in a few minutes, if the little room weren't too hot from the noonday sun, Billy would have shut the door behind him, stripped off his clothes, and gone to bed with her.

If
he'd thought he was completely welcome in this room.

As it was, he took a deep breath and went to the kitchen just at the end of the tiny hall.

Grandpa came to join him for sandwiches and iced tea while Ellen kept the stand; the two of them took turns at the stand most days.

"Have we got another window fan?" Billy asked suddenly, his thoughts on the fluff of hair that clung to Shiloh's temple, the way it had cajoled him to brush it away from her skin.

"I don't think so. What you need one for?"

"Shiloh's asleep in the back room." Billy jerked his head in that direction. "It was a little hot back there when I checked on her."

"That room's got windows on the east and north," Grandpa said consideringly. "That means it ought to stay pretty cool. It gets lots of morning sun and afternoon shade. But come next month, ain't no place cool. Not ever, not in Mississippi."

"I swear I thought I'd have the money to have this house insulated again this summer, and central air put in," Billy said, turning up his glass to drain it.

"You needed the tractor-trailer more, to haul the nursery stock. Like you'll need some for this fall, if you've got any left. Where'd you get the money to pay that jail fine?" his grandfather asked curiously.

"I just—had it, all right?"

Willie snorted. "Don't get hot with me, boy. It's just gonna be a shame if you had to use the money you've saved for good purposes to pay a fine for-"

"Grandpa, don't say anything to Shiloh about this, you hear me?"

"You mean you ain't told your own wife—"

"That's right. Not yet, anyway." Billy held his grandfather's stare for a long moment.

"This is the funniest marriage I ever heard of in my life," Willie groused at last, disapproval in his voice.

"I've not got time to worry about that," Billy returned, pushing his chair back to stand. "I don't want Shiloh havin' to sleep in a hot room. She's used to something different"

"She'd better get used to
you,
and you to her."

Willie's words were in his ears when he lingered by Shiloh's room on his way out to the farm. She was awake, sitting up drowsily in the middle of a wedding-ring circle stitched into the quilt, raking her hair back off her face.

As he stood in the doorway, she caught sight of him and smiled, a sleepy, sensual smile that gave him more hope than he'd had all day.

"Feel better?"

She nodded wordlessly, then yawned and stretched, her movements lifting her breasts against the blue dress, lifting her upper body into an innocently erotic pose.

"I'm going out on the farm. Want to go with me?" His voice was careless as he tried hard not to care whether she did or not.

Shiloh moved, then she looked down blankly at her dress.

"I don't think I can," she said, whimsically. "Why not? If you're hungry, we can get you a sandwich first."

"It's not that. Billy, haven't you noticed? I don't have any clothes."

He pulled his gaze from her rueful dark eyes and scanned her body. "I believe I'd notice if you didn't have on anything, honey. Yes, ma'am, I definitely would," he informed her humorously.

She stood up abruptly, letting the blue dress skim down around her legs. "I put this dress on yesterday morning so I could take the town by storm with Billy Walker."

"We sure did that. I don't know if they'll remember what we were wearin' or not, though."

She sighed in exasperation. "I've been wearing it ever since. I either have to wash it, and wear a sheet while it dries—"

"Sounds like a good idea. Whose sheet?" he interrupted daringly, a glint in his eye.

Her face flushed pinkly as she took a step backward, but her voice was severe. "This is serious. I have to get some other clothes. I've got closets full at home that I
—"

"No."

"Some of them are mine, bought with my own money, Billy. Not his."

He took another step into the room, his hands going to his hips. "If you go back now, no matter for what reason, you'll only get tore up again, Shiloh. Looks like to me that we're having a hard enough time today without that. You're scared to set foot in my bedroom."

Tucking her hair behind one ear, Shiloh ignored the challenge in his words and looked at her bare feet. "So, what am I going to wear? I have a little money with me, and a checking account, if Sam hasn't closed it."

"Don't you think," Billy said tightly, his face angry, "that I might buy you clothes? You're my wife. Most men do."

"But you don't have any—" She clipped the words off sharply, and hastily substituted, "I don't want to take your money, Billy. It would feel funny."

"Tell me about it. It felt pretty funny to me to take yours, too, but sometimes you've got to do things." He took another step closer to her, so close now she could have reached out and touched him; his eyes searched hers. "I'm supposed to buy clothes for you, Shiloh. The sooner you let me, the sooner this will start to feel normal."

"Where are you—where are we going to get the money?" she whispered at last, her eyes luminous.

Billy's face lightened instantly, and he laughed a little as he reached out to graze her face with his knuckles. "I made a deal with a chain of stores over in Arkansas. Sold a whole acre of trees to them last month. Remember when I came to the bank? See, I had more on my mind than just aggravating you." His eyes teased her a minute. "That's the first deal that big I've ever made. I'm due to sell the same amount to them every month right up until Thanksgiving. That's several thousand dollars every time I make a sale, even after I cover my expenses."

"And can you live on that?"

"All winter, if we're careful."

"Oh, good."

Shiloh fumbled for an answer, all too aware that Sam put out not thousands, but tens of thousands, every week, and he brought in double that amount.

They hesitated for a long second or two, then Billy reached out and ran his long brown finger down her throat, to the hollow between her breasts.

"It's Friday. I've got to check on some things around the farm. If you want to use the washing machine, it's beside the bathroom. You could get ready—we could go to town when I get back. I think you'll feel better if it's just you and me for a while, instead of my whole family crammed down your throat."

"Not Sweetwater."

"No. Maybe Martinsville. There's a shopping center there. Then we'll do something—eat, dance, go to a movie."

"Are you asking me for a date?" she asked mischievously, trying to ignore the hand at her breasts. "An honest-to-goodness, public date?"

"There's a first time for everything," he retorted, unevenly. "Isn't this the way we're supposed to do it? Get married and then date?" As his eyes held hers, his big hand flattened slowly across her, his fingers slipping under the blue fabric with the insidious strength of sweet outlaw honeysuckle in a prim garden, to lie heavily, hotly against her skin.

She never looked down, just up at him as she said unsteadily, "I think you're awfully free with your hands for a man who doesn't even know if I've agreed to go out with him or not."

"I'm trying to persuade you."

"And do I get more of
this"
—she caught his marauding hand with hers—"if I say yes? Or will you behave?"

He eyed her face for a minute, then let his hand drop away. "I think I'd better behave." He sighed.

Unexpectedly, she reached out to flatten her own hands against his shirt, rubbing her palms over him sensually. "That's a shame," she said regretfully, stepping up into him, against him, feeling the breath as it caught in his chest. "All of my dates who are also married to me have to fool around"—she reached to rain a kiss into the warm hollow of his throat—"when they take me out, or I don't go." She kissed the side of his throat. "So if you're going to behave—"

"I take it back. It was a lie. I won't," he interrupted fervently, his blue eyes laughing down at her in a combination of shock and delight as he caught her hands and pulled them around himself, locking her to him. "I'll put every move I've ever heard of on you, baby. I'll be a regular octopus."