Billy Bob Walker Got Married (14 page)

"You're crazy. I don't want to kiss you because that's got nothing to do with our deal. And besides"—Shiloh knew she should quit while she was ahead, but her tongue wouldn't obey
—
"I've heard you spread yourself thin.

You're available to everything in skirts these days. I'd rather have kisses that are a little bit fresher, from a man who's a little more discriminating. Yours are too cheap for my taste."

For an instant she actually thought he might hit her; then his face flushed red as he pulled away from her and faced forward out the window.

At last she reached for the gear shift, and to her surprise, her hand was shaking a little. "We'll go back," she whispered.

"No."

He never looked at her; his jaw was as tight and set as granite. "No, we won't. We'll get this over with, because I don't have the damn money to repay you. And when it's done, and we get back to Sweetwater, you walk on your side of the street and I'll walk on mine."

"But—"

"And when you finally get up the nerve to tell Sam, you send word to me and we'll end it. Then I won't owe you one red cent, and I swear to God I'll never come near you again. So drive on. Have the guts to do what you set out to do at least."

And after a long, long moment of indecision, Shiloh pulled from the little park and headed out—toward Memphis.

She'd paid good money for him, after all.

The Shelby County Administration Building was big and crowded, and they waited for a little while in line.

Then it was simple. Quick. Cold-blooded. Painless.

They proved they were over eighteen with their driver's licenses. They signed the marriage license. And Shiloh paid the fee.

"No," she told him as he reached for his wallet, "it's my party, remember? I'm paying." "Fine," he said stonily. And that was that.

The marriage was more difficult.

The judge who married them was easy to locate, just a little way from where they bought the license. He was young, round, and prematurely bald—nothing at all like Robert Sewell.

Billy took time to be grateful for that small mercy, but he tried not to look down past the man's nose so that he wouldn't notice his robe.

They had little or no trouble finding witnesses. The next couple waiting to be married
—
both barely out of their teens—w
ere pressed into service by the
judge.

"Now, I believe we've got everything," he declared at last in relief. "If you will just stand here"—he motioned fussily to a spot somewhere in front of him—"we'll get this started."

He glanced down at the license. "You're William Robert Walker—I always like to get names down properly. And you're Shiloh—what a lovely name—Pennington. No middle name?"

"No," she said, her voice tiny and a little nervous.

"Fine, fine. Let's see, you've got license, witnesses— how about the rings?"

They stared blankly at the judge for a minute.

"Rings," Shiloh murmured helplessly, looking up at Billy Bob, and there was a long waiting pause.

"I think we forgot the rings," he told the judge at last.

The man looked from one of them to the other, his pumpkin-shaped face puzzled. Then he asked slowly, "Is this marriage a hasty one? Something you've only recently decided to do?"

And for the first time he stopped and looked them over—Shiloh in the white suit, Billy in the worn jeans. He couldn't help but notice how Shiloh was standing well away from the man beside her instead of holding his hand or hugging up to him the way the happy two waiting their turn were standing.

"Perhaps you'd like to talk to one another in private," the judge added at last.

"No," Shiloh replied quickly.

"We've done all the talking we need to do," said Billy ironically.

"But both of you seem so unprepared—" "Reckon we're better at things besides talking," Billy drawled outrageously, reaching out to wrap his big hand around Shiloh's upper arm. "You could say we're sorta gettin' married in a fever."

The judge's cheeks flushed nearly as darkly as Shiloh's. "Marriage is not something to do on a spare day," he said repressively, "or on a whim with a person you barely know, or somebody you've met as a ... a one-night acquaintance." He could barely get out the last three words.

"I've known him four years," Shiloh interposed, "and here, I'll use this for a ring. He can get me one later, or something." She tugged hurriedly at the gold college ring she wore, and when it slid off, she held it out for the judge's inspection.

"Well, if this is what you want," he said reluctantly, then opened his tiny black book with the civil wedding ceremony in it.

Billy remembered to reach up and pull off the cap, holding it in one hand. Then he remembered more, that once he had thought about eloping somewhere with Shiloh. It had sounded dangerous, and exciting, and romantic. But the reality was something far different.

The judge's chambers were routine and boring. The paneled walls held recessed shelves full of heavy dark books, volumes of law, no doubt. The desk in the corner by the window was neat as a pin with only a picture of a blond-haired woman and a little girl with her father's pumpkin-shaped face sitting on it. And outside the window were buildings and rows of more buildings against the blue of the afternoon sky. When the sun poured in through the panes, it fell on a commercial tourist painting—a collage of sorts about Tennessee—that somebody had hung on the wall.

He was getting married, Billy thought, not in the eyes of God and friends, but under the watchful gaze of Andrew Jackson and Roy Acuff as they stared down from that collage; even a youthful Elvis sneered at them.

And as the judge began, a loud jet swept over the building on its way to a landing at the Memphis airport, nearly drowning the words.

He wished he'd never done this. He wished he were modern and up-to-date, as casual about marriage as the rest of humanity seemed to be nowadays. He wished he didn't remember that he'd also once thought of marrying this same girl in the little church at Seven Knobs where his mother went, where old Brother Thompson talked about a friendly God and knew Billy Bob the child and Billy Bob the man and loved him anyway, in spite of his predilection for Saturday-night carousing and Sunday-morning sleeping-in.

He wanted to go home, away from this strange judge, and the two teenagers, and Elvis and Roy—and away from the woman by his side who was repeating her vows calmly enough.

"... until death do us part." Her voice was so low it was barely audible.

"You may give him the ring as a token of the promise you have made," the judge informed Shiloh gravely, and she nodded jerkily and held the ring out toward him.

He remembered to hold out his hand, and she hesitated a minute, uncertain what to do. The ring was small, his hand large, twice the size of hers. It might, with effort, fit his little finger.

On that thought, Billy took her hand in his right one, catching it along with the cap he still held, and all of a sudden, as if an electric bolt of knowledge had been hooked into him, Billy felt her true emotions: her hand was trembling a little, too warm and too wet with perspiration. She was as uptight as he was, and the knowledge sent a wave of relief through him.

Her dark hair looked nearly auburn in the light from the window, and as he stared down at the top of her bent head, she looked up in one fleeting, puzzled glance at his stillness.

Shiloh had always had the brownest eyes he'd ever seen—as wide as an inquiring deer's. Eyes that led you straight down to her soul, if you only knew how to see it.

Right now, at this minute, they were the same eyes he'd fallen into that afternoon he'd first seen her on the back porch of Sam's house. It didn't matter that this was Memphis, not Seven Knobs, and that all the years had come between them.

For a few seconds, he could forget Sam and Sewell and his brother, Michael, and just remember that he'd once loved her.

He pushed her hand toward the finger he had extended, showing her to slide the ring on it. It hung on his knuckle—he might have to cut the gold band off—but it went on at last.

Her fingers clung to his for a minute, and he wrapped her hand in his and held on.

The judge, satisfied, continued. "And do you, William Robert Walker, take this woman ..."

He got out the words by watching the judge's face; she was watching his, her head tilted to see him as he spoke. Why?

The judge tried to be gracious. "Since there is no ring, you may kiss your bride as a token of these vows."

He didn't look at her as he bent quickly toward her cheek; in spite of everything, her words burned in his ears. His kisses were "too cheap" for her taste.

But as he laid his lips coolly against her skin, she suddenly shocked him by turning her head, and her mouth found his, pressing against it, clinging for an instant. It was a fleeting touch, but every nerve, every cell, every fiber in him went on red-hot, instant alert.

He remembered her.

The scent of her skin. The feel of her face against his. The taste of her mouth.

He thought he'd remembered, but he hadn't. His memories held only a fraction of the reality.
This
was Shiloh. This pounding in the veins. This taste of sweetness. This weight against him.

It hurt, the sudden resurrection of long-buried, intense sensation, so he pulled away in self-preservation, and she dropped her head and cut off the visual link, and then he remembered one more thing: why he hated her. She'd made him feel this alive once before, then walked away and left him trying to find the same fire in the blood with somebody else. Anybody else.

She'd left him half-alive, trying to survive, desperate.

". . . and I pronounce you man and wife," said the judge expansively, beaming at them.

"Thank you," said Billy Bob, and then he dropped Shiloh's hand and turned away.

Shiloh decided to stop and eat out of boredom. The big man in the car with her had been deathly quiet ever since they'd pulled out of Memphis a half hour ago. Now they were well into Mississippi.

What was wrong with him? Still sulking because she hadn't liked his reputation with women? Tough, she thought without much sympathy.

But there was more than that: something had happened in the judge's chambers.

You happened, you idiot, she thought to herself. Why did you have to go and kiss him after the fuss you raised? There was no reason for it.
None.

Except, he'd been close. Too close. And as he stood there beside her, his head and shoulders above her, his hand hard and warm around hers, he hadn't been Billy Walker, the wild man of Briskin County. Instead, he'd been tall and strong and handsome, and solid as a rock. He'd been the man she'd once thought he was, somebody who loved her, not because he needed to control her or because she looked like her mother or because he was afraid of being alone, but because he liked her as she was, because he wanted to be with her.

And there was a strong sexual attraction to Billy, too, something that had nothing to do with love. Shiloh saw clearly now what Laura had once warned her about. It was in the way he moved, in the strong column of his neck, in the lazy, easy way he had of slanting sideways looks at her, in his slow smile. Billy Bob dripped sex appeal.

As she'd watched his lips as he repeated the vows, she thought with a sharp, tearing pang that it would be paradise to have a man love her the way she wanted to be loved, to have a man with this brand of potent attraction swearing fidelity to her, offering his strength and his loyalty to her, and honest-to-God meaning it.

And that thought made her twist her head a fraction of an inch and touch his lips.

Warmth. The taste of salt. And the realization that he was startled—and wary—and too quick to pull away. She caught all those sensations.

It was nothing like their kisses of old, but there'd been just enough to tantalize and begin a slow swirl around the still, puddled edges of emotions.

But reality had to intrude: Billy kissed a lot of girls. He knew his way around women. Those emotions were old hat to him.

Weren't they?

"Want to get something to eat?" Shiloh asked as she pulled in at a little restaurant called the Rebel Inn.

Billy looked at it and shrugged. "Sure."

"Are you hungry?"

He considered that a minute. "What time is it?" he asked instead.

She glanced at her wrist. "Three-thirty." "Then I guess I am."

"When did you last eat?" "Breakfast, at the jail."

"Me, too. Breakfast, that is. But I was so nervous I couldn't eat much."

She opened her door and climbed out, leaving him to follow suit, and he caught up with her at the glass entrance door, which he pushed open for her.

It was a middle-of-the-road place, not too fancy, not too plain, mostly empty at this time of day.

Catfish was the specialty, so they both had it, and when the waitress left, Billy asked abruptly, "What were you nervous about?"

It took a minute for her to remember what he was referring to.

"Oh, I don't know. I just never got married before." "There wasn't much to it."

"No. I guess, in real marriage, the hard part starts now."

He thought about that for a minute. "Well, things won't change for us. Except, you may wake up tomorrow morning and be sorry. What if you and Michael, you know, patch things up? What'11 you do about me?"