Billy Bob Walker Got Married (8 page)

But in a way it had almost been a relief to face him, to come out in the open with the truth: "I love her," he'd said steadily after they'd gone inside the big house.

Shiloh had been clutching at his hand with both of hers, facing Sam across the room. For a few minutes, he'd actually thought everything was going to be all right. That was before Sam started to speak—slowly, calmly, even kindly.

"So you love her. Do you know how old she is?" "Eighteen."

"And you're twenty-three. Just what do the two of you plan to do about this 'love'?"

Billy looked down at Shiloh, but he had no fears about his answer: he meant to do—wanted to do—the right thing. "We want to get married," he'd said simply, with a touch of pride, and his fingers tightened around Shiloh's, his mind registering her little gasp of surprise.

Sam was silent a minute before he laughed. It had been a tiny, incredulous sound. "Get married," he repeated. "Yes, I'm sure you do, Mr. Walker. You've got no big plans for your life. No pressing career. No ambition. No money. Shiloh has all of that. You'd do very well to marry my daughter."

The older man's voice had been so deceptively soft that it had taken a few seconds for his words to register.

(

Then Billy Bob's face flamed red as both he and Shiloh broke into protest. "He's not like that, Papa! And you've—" "I love her," Billy repeated hotly, and he put his arms around Shiloh to hold her tightly against him, to reassure himself that she was really his, not this hard-eyed man's across the room from him.

"Then I hope you love her enough to let her go," Pennington shot back, turning to fumble in a box on the big
mahogany
desk for a fat cigar, as if he couldn't stand to see the two of them together. He put the brown tube of tobacco to his lips, then removed it to add, "because you can't afford her. You can't send her to college, or buy her clothes, or make the payments on the kind of car that's being delivered here next week. She's out of your league."

"Papa, I don't care about any of that," Shiloh protested, twisting in Billy's arms to face her father.

"Yes, you do. Or you will when you get a little older. You'll learn to hate this plowboy when you see all that he costs you. Maybe you're too young to know that, but he's not."

"We'll do all right," he'd told Pennington stubbornly.

"How? By living on that old farm of your grandpa's? It might be productive if you had the money to invest in it, but you don't." The older man never even lit the cigar; instead, he broke it into two pieces in his fingers. "And tell me." he'd said silkily. "whose last name are you gonna give my girl? Because the only one you've got belongs to your mother. No man's ever claimed you."

Something exploded in Billy's brain as he stared in an incredulous rage at Shiloh's father. He'd heard the man was a bare-knuckles, down-and-dirty fighter when he wanted to be, and neither he nor Shiloh had dared to hope for his blessing, but Billy hadn't expected this.

"Billy?" Shiloh strained upward from his painful grasp to gaze at his too-white face above hers. "What's he—"

"He's a bastard. Didn't he tell you that?" Sam interrupted, his voice calm. "No father. Doesn't even know who he is."

"You know damn well who fathered me," Billy got out, strangled. Then he looked down into Shiloh's shocked face, and he turned her loose. "It's him—Sam Pennington—who's the bastard," he said, bitterly.

"It doesn't matter to me about your not having a father." she said, but her voice was shaken. "But there's no need to call Papa names. He's just trying to protect me."

"You don't need protection from me—" Billy began.

"Shiloh, listen to me," Pennington cut in. "I'm not asking you to give up this boy. I can see you care about him. But at least give me a little time to get used to the idea. Come with me to Mexico on this next business trip so we can talk this through. At least let me have a chance to—to adjust before you marry him."

Pennington's words were entreating, and as he spoke, he advanced on his daughter, his hand open palmed and outstretched in front of him, making a silent plea for him.

She stared at him, at his hand, as she stood indecisively between the two of them.

"If I can't talk you out of this thing with Walker." he

_I

told his daughter quietly, "I'll learn to accept it. Come to Mexico."

"No," Billy said in quick, panicky protest, and then he made a fatal mistake out of pure desperation. "You can't have both of us. Choose, Shiloh. It's either me—or it's him." What else was he to do? He couldn't compete with a glamorous trip, where Sam Pennington was going to spend his time pointing out Billy’s shortcomings. He'd suddenly become painfully aware himself of his old clothes—the tan shirt, the faded Wranglers—and the less-than-mint condition of his Ford truck. How could she help but disdain him? He knew right then that she'd

have to be crazy to choose him for anything, let alone a husband. "All I can say is—I love you," Sam told his daughter quietly. "And unlike him, I'm not asking you to give anything up. I just need time." There were tears in his eyes—Billy himself saw them—before Sam turned away from them. Shiloh saw them, too.

"Papa," she'd whispered, and the one word was choked with emotion.

When she hesitantly put her hand in Sam's, Billy turned and stalked out.

Shiloh called his name, then ran after him to catch him outside on the porch. He could still remember how the low-cut white cotton top had accented the smooth, tanned hollow between her breasts where her heart beat as he looked down at her.

"Don't grab at me," he blazed at her, shaking off her hand. "Not unless you're comin' with me."

"I love you, Billy," she said pleadingly.

"What difference does that make now? You love him, too, but he means to see that there's no room for me in your life. And you'll let him."

"He needs me, Billy. I'm all he has. It's been that way ever since my mother left. Let me talk to him. It won't hurt to give him the time. We'll have the rest—"

He interrupted her harshly. "We'll have nothin'. Didn't you hear him? I reckon I'm not good enough for you, and he's not gonna let me try to be. That's okay. There's other girls. And their daddies, they're not so particular."

She looked stricken, then she flushed with anger. "You so much as touch another woman, Billy Walker, and we're through."

"That's what I'm tryin' to tell you. baby," he retorted. "You chose Daddy, remember? And you had a lucky escape, because he's right—I'm going nowhere much, and I
was
born on the wrong side of the blanket. Now, get out of my way."

She had not said another word as he walked away, his shoulders squared. But he'd seen her face as he drove off, and she had looked then much as she did right now, across the jail cell from him—angry and hurt.

But she had learned to conceal her emotions better in their years apart, and her face smoothed even as he stared at her.

"I didn't understand why you were so angry that night," Shiloh said haltingly, and her huge brown eyes looked right up into his. "It knocked me off balance when you told Sam you meant for us to marry. We hadn't talked about it much, but it was all you could say when he jumped you about things. You must have been scared, too, like I was when he caught us." Billy Bob didn't answer.

"And there was more," she said haltingly. "Sam hurt your pride. And somehow, so did I. I didn't know that then, but I do now."

"You don't know anything," he answered shortly.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"I'm not," he returned, his voice flat. "Because if you let Sam Pennington talk you out of me in thirty minutes, we never stood a chance, anyway."

"I called you," she said suddenly, as if it made a difference after all this time. "I'd been in Acapulco three weeks before I finally . . . got over being mad. Your mother answered. I didn't tell her who I was. I didn't know if she knew about me. She said you were in Tupelo."

He stared at her, his eyes bright blue even in the dusky shadows. "I left town. Took a job on the road for the summer. You didn't come back."

"No," she answered, looking down at her hands. "Things—business—kept us down there until September. I came home for a day or two before I left for college. You weren't here. And . . . things had changed.

"I saw you once in town at Christmas. You never spoke," he remembered.

"I'd seen you before then. Maybe when I was home for Thanksgiving," she said, so low he had to strain to hear her. "But I knew it was over. There wasn't any point in talking to you."

"And then Michael Sewell started hanging around," he said starkly. She would never know how difficult it was for him to get that simple sentence out.

Shiloh didn't try to answer him, just watching him mutely. Then he pulled away from the bars and turned his back to her.

"Damn you, Shiloh." There was absolutely no emotion in his voice.

He lay down on the narrow cot again, turning his face to the wall. Even if he already knew it, it hurt to hear how easy it had been for her to forget him.

She lay on her own cot, silent too. When T-Tommy came in a few minutes later, he must have thought his two prisoners were asleep. He snapped off the light, and the cells lay in darkness.

Billy Bob stared at the patterns of light that the moon outside cast on the distant walls, hating the girl who lay not twelve feet from him. The breeze that blew in his window was cold on his arms, so he fumbled for the rough blanket and dragged it half over him. and his movement seemed to shatter the stillness around them.

"I saw you with another girl," she said suddenly, in the darkness.

He froze. "What?"

"I hadn't been back in town a good day that November when I saw you in a car with another girl. She was driving, and she let you out in front of the courthouse. You kissed her, and she was all over you."

Slowly, Billy twisted on the cot, dragging the blanket with him. "And that made a difference?"

"No.
No.
Not to me, not then. It just proved Sam was right, that's all. We weren't supposed to be together."

"I see."

This time the silence seemed eternal. In the darkness, he struggled with himself. It didn't matter, not now, what had happened then. It was over, in the past. He didn't love her anymore; most of the time he hated her. Especially when he remembered that in a few weeks' time, she was set to marry Michael. His own brother.

But . . .
it didn't matter.
They deserved each other.

Still, he couldn't stop the explanation that tumbled from his lips at last.

"The only reason I was with Angie was that you were gone." He said it suddenly, shattering the long silence. He didn't turn from the wall.

But there was nothing from her.

"Shiloh?"

At last he sat up. She lay sideways, facing him with the light of the big moon falling over her shoulders—sound asleep.

"Really tearing your heart out over this, aren't your he asked the sleeping girl fiercely. "I think I'm sorry for Michael."

She woke him up just before dawn, crying in her sleep and calling Michael's name. The word froze his sudden, startled, awakening movements and an old, better-forgotten jealousy stabbed him.

But that was before his mind registered the fear in her voice.

"No—no," she was whimpering, over and over, twisting on the bed. "Michael—"

"Shiloh!" he said it sharply, rising to go to the bars. "Wake up. Shiloh!"

She stilled, then gasped.

"Shiloh, are you awake?"

The moonlight touched his face this time, coming in from a different angle, and she gave a short, choked cry that was full of fear.

"Wake up, Shiloh, you're having a bad dream."

He could hear her breathing change as she tried to orient herself, then she asked tentatively, "Billy?"

"What?"

"I thought you were—-" "I know what you thought."

She sat up abruptly. "I'm . . . I'm sorry." But her teeth chattered.

"What for?" he asked dismissively. "Just forget it. Try to go back to sleep."

But instead she stood up, moving away from the tangled cot as if she were afraid of it, and she came hesitantly across the cold concrete floor toward the bars that separated them.

He stilled, watching her warily as she advanced, her bare, silk-stockinged feet making only a slight wisping sound.

"Did you ever think that God does funny things? You ask Him for help, and there's no telling where you'll wind up," Shiloh whispered, putting her hands on the bars between them. Another moth circling another light, that was what she reminded him of as she gravitated unwillingly toward him.

"What are you talking about?" he asked suspiciously.

"Things have been going wrong ever since I came home from college. I want to please Sam, but I can't. And this past week"—she laughed a little—"it's been like something out of a horror story. Here I am now, in jail, with the one person who doesn't want to see me, the one person I never meant to speak to again."

"Let me guess," he said ironically. "You're not talking about T-Tommy."

"So help me, Billy Bob," she choked out, and she was crying—crying, for God's sakes. "I must be in here for a reason."

"What's the matter?
What?"
he demanded, and he rose, too, and went to the bars where she stood. He could feel the warmth from her body this close—it was too close—and smell the rich scent of her perfume. It, too, was different from the one he remembered.