Billy Bob Walker Got Married (6 page)

When Shiloh awoke, the sun was sinking behind the heavy stand of pines at the far end of the yard, and a slightly chilly twilight breeze brushed across her bare arms from the French door.

Michael was with her for a flashing instant as she struggled up out of sleep, and she gave a hard, frightened jerk that knocked pillows onto the floor.

Shiloh sat up abruptly and shivered. How long would it be before she forgot what happened last night?

Putting her hand to her mouth to stifle the moan, she came up off the bed in one quick motion.

Laura was right: she had to tell Sam. He wasn't heartless, and he was her father; surely she could make him understand. She would tell him tonight at supper.

In the shower, the warm, soothing water sluiced over her, washing away the memories she'd spent the afternoon with, and she toweled herself dry roughly.

When she sat down in front of the mirror, she could find no trace of fear or anger in her face. It looked like always: smooth skin, with a touch of brown rather than pink in it; wide brown eyes above high cheekbones; a nose that wasn't quite perfect—it had a tiny tilt at the bottom instead of being elegantly classic; a wide mouth; and a wild cloud of wine-brown hair that nearly—but not quite—touched her shoulders.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, to inspire passionate love nor ugly lust that she could see.

They said that she looked like Caroline, all the people of Sweetwater, and that Caroline had been a raving beauty when she was young. Shiloh could barely remember her then; her mother had left when she was five. Once, though, she had seen a picture in the attic and she'd stared at it with all the hungry fascination of a twelve-year-old. It had lasted until she realized what she was doing. Then she'd dropped the picture like a scorching coal and had gone running out of the attic.

She remembered enough about Caroline and her leaving to want no part of her.

The girl in the mirror swallowed. Her mother had had an effect, even gone. Shiloh had stayed away from men. She'd never even flirted with one until she was eighteen, and then it had started so easily and felt so right she'd been involved with him before she knew it.

Billy Bob Walker.

Shiloh winced and closed her eyes as his face floated into her mind. It was Michael's face—but no, not quite. Funny, but when she'd first started dating Michael last fall, his resemblance to Billy Bob had only enhanced his appeal.

Now just the opposite happened.

Billy had brown streaks in his hair, hair too shaggy and too long. Michael was more purely blond, his hair clipped close to his head and styled neatly. Billy's face was thinner, one tooth was slightly out of line, his eyebrows were brown, the planes of his cheekbones high and smooth beneath his long blue eves. He had a beautiful nose, straighter and more exact than Michael's. And where Michael was square and muscular, Billy was lankier and longer. He looked like what he was—a farmhand.

She could remember Sam's fury when he found out, although she never knew who'd seen her and Billy Bob together and told him.

"You're a kid. He's five years older than you and he's got nothing. Not one red cent. No future. And if that's not enough, he's—" Sam broke off his words.

Shiloh remembered that she'd been crying, terrified of her father's anger and hurting because she was about to lose Billy Bob. "What? What is he, Papa?" she had asked him pleadingly. "I know he's not mean. He hasn't done anything to hurt me."

"Exactly what has he done?" Sam asked at last, more quietly. "You've apparently been slipping off to meet him all summer. How far has he gone, Shiloh?"

She had flushed and mumbled, "Not that. I—we didn't do that, Papa. I promise."

He had finally let out his breath in an expulsion of relief, then reached out to touch her face. "Good. You're too young. You've got college and your whole life ahead of you. Don't get mixed up with any man yet. As for Walker," Sam continued, oblivious to her emotions, "he's just not like you. He's not going anywhere. He'll marry some girl from out at Seven Knobs, have a pack of kids, and die a poor man."

"He loves me," Shiloh said steadily.

"He'll find somebody else who's available when you’re gone," Sam told her bluntly.

And he had been right: Billy Bob had.

It had hurt, but it had been four years ago. And Sam had been so pleased with her that summer that she had pushed Billy out of her mind and out of her heart. Maybe it had been—up until now—her one and only real spurt of rebellion.

But she didn't hate Billy Bob. Dislike him. maybe when he was as obnoxious as he'd been this afternoon. But most of her memories, dim and hazy though they were, were pleasant enough.

She doubted she would ever have a pleasant memory of Michael, and she shuddered before she went to the closet to get dressed.

For all its stylish cut, the black dress was meant to soothe Sam's feathers. He liked the somber color, and he would like the simplicity of the nearly straight sheath that curved in around Shiloh's narrow waist.

She twisted once in front of the mirror, her hair swinging richly, brushing the tops of her shoulders. Almost unconsciously, she raised her fingers to brush the same place on her left breast that she'd brushed a thousand times in the last day, and her throat knotted.

In the kitchen, Laura hovered anxiously over the oven. The chicken smelled like heaven, and Shiloh remembered that she hadn't eaten since breakfast.

Leaning over a silver tray to steal a cream cheese tart, she told the housekeeper, "I'm starving. What'd we do to deserve these"—she waved the tart—"in the middle of the week?"

Laura avoided looking directly at her. "There's hors d'oeuvres out, too," she offered. "Miniature broccoli quiches."

Shiloh stopped eating and stared. "Miniature broc— are you sick, Laura? All this for me and Sam?"

"And his company,"' Laura told her, meaningfully.

"He brought somebody home with him?" she asked in surprise, frowning. "I thought he was set to rake me over the coals. I guess I'm relieved. What can he do to me with company watching? But I don't—"

"You'd better go on out and get it over with," Laura interrupted, "or else there won't be any quiches left. The judge always eats a ton of them." She glanced carefully over at Shiloh as she removed a dish from the oven.

Her words froze Shiloh in motion, and her eyes came up to Laura's sympathetic ones, wide and startled. "What? What did you say?"

"Judge Sewell's here," Laura answered flatly.

At last temper seeped over Shiloh's face, replacing the near-terror of an instant before. "How could he? He didn't even give me a chance before he called Michael's father over. Just like always, he rides roughshod over what I want, and when it's too late, I'm right where he wants me to be. But it—it can't be that way this time, Laura."

The housekeeper looked at the pleading face in front of her. "So go tell them that," she advised bluntly, and as the other woman went out the swinging door on a wave of anger and light perfume, Laura asked nobody in general, "Wonder if I should have mentioned who was with the judge?"

His elegant wife, Lydia. That was who stood by the side of Robert Sewell. Always dainty. always fashionable, she looked undersized and overdressed as she stood by the big, broad-shouldered judge in his subdued navy suit. Only two things gave away his lurking vanity—the carefully waved, lacquered hair and the diamond ring that sparkled on his right hand in the light of a nearby lamp.

Shiloh did what she always did when she was scared senseless: She talked to herself. Be calm, she said; act natural. So you won't marry his son. They can't make you, no matter how cold their eves. She met her father's warning look as he turned from his conversation with the couple.

"Judge Sewell," she said steadily. Good, she thought, that's it—calm, unruffled. "And Mrs. Sewell."

A movement in the flame-stitched wingback chair that faced away from her caught her peripheral vision. It stopped Shiloh's words like a hand around her heart; she knew intuitively who it was even before the gilt-blond head rose.

"Hello, Shiloh."

Michael's words were as calm as hers, his face emotionless as he turned to face her. He was dressed for the evening, too, in his own well-cut navy suit, crisp white shirt, and striped tie. He looked like a Bill Blass version of a young blond sun god.

She couldn't speak, that clutch of emotions still strangling her. She could see the two of them on the carpet again, right here, nearly where he stood now.

Him, ripping and tearing and hurting.

Her, shivering and begging and crying.

"I like your dress. It suits you," he said at last into the silence. His voice was low, husky, and for one crazy minute, Shiloh saw Billy Bob Walker standing there. His face had worn the same intense look that Michael's had now.

She got her breath all at once, in a rush that nearly floored her. "It's good to see you. But I have to run. I have a—a date tonight."

"Shiloh!" Sam's voice was disbelieving and hard. "I asked you to be home for supper. You agreed. So even if you have made other plans'"—and his voice said clearly he didn't believe a word of it—"you can just unmake them."

"Look, I'm not going to be civilized about this," she told him desperately. "Everybody here already knows I broke the engagement with Michael. So either he leaves, or I do."

Her father's gasped outrage was only slightly louder than Lydia Sewell's.

"I mean it," she said stubbornly.

"Let me talk to her, sir," Michael asked pleadingly. "She's got to listen to me sometime. She's got to explain to me why—"

"No," she cut in, panicky that they might really leave her with him. "And if you don't stay away from me, I'll tell them right now what happened between us."

His white teeth flashed in a sort of pleading half smile. "Shiloh, please, listen. I love you."

"You
will
listen to him, Shiloh," Sam said firmly.

"Just like I
will
many him? I don't have to do anything if I don't want to. And I want to leave." Never in a million years could she have imagined talking like this to Sam, but fear forced her to it. She twisted away, out the door and down the hall. Heavy footsteps sounded behind her; she knew them even before Michael's hand clamped over her shoulder and the same terror that had loosened her tongue poured down her body like a cold drench of water.

She jerked frantically away as he pulled her around. "Don't touch me!"

Michael's eves burned like blue fire as he stared down at her, but Sam's voice over his shoulder cut off any words he intended to speak.

"You're not going anywhere, Shiloh. You and Michael need to sit down and talk about this."

Shiloh looked from Michael's set face to her father's, then she reached behind herself and flung open the door.

Sam swore. "Dammit, girl, what's got into you? Whatever it is. if you take out of here in that hell-on-wheels car you drive, I'll put T-Tommy on you. He'll get you back even if he has to drag you."

"He'll have to catch me first," she cried over her shoulder; then she ran, heels, black dress, and all, out into the night.

The Porsche burned the wind down the long, stretching road, flying past dark, flat cotton and rice fields and the squat, shadowy little shacks that lay along Highway 25 as it ran west, leading to the delta, miles away.

They wouldn't make her face Michael tonight. She pressed down on the gas pedal, shooting through Mississippi—at least her piece of it—at ninety miles an hour.

A revival was
going on at the Church of God on the corner, two buildings down the dark, quiet street from the jail. The preacher was loud and long and not half bad—and Billy Bob ought to know. He'd been hearing the man's sermons drift in on the night air for most of the week, ringing out the raised windows of the old clapboard church and floating down the road and through the open, but barred, ones of the jail, bringing salvation right to the only sinner T-Tommy had in custody these days—himself.

The crowd down at the little steepled building, with their shouts of "amen" and their loud music, was nearly as rowdy as the one at the Country Palace, Billy Bob thought wryly, but at least their enthusiasm was taking them to heaven, not to accommodations provided by Briskin County.

He leaned backward against the cool, gray-painted concrete blocks of the wall beside the window and watched a huge luna moth flutter inquiringly around the distant yellow glow of the naked bulb in the ceiling. In this old jail, the ceilings were twelve feet high, so that the light got lost long before it could reach down to find him. It cast only a sort of dim glow over the bars and the narrow cot where Bill) Bob slept.

Eleven days he'd been here. Nineteen more to go, if he could just grit his teeth and bear it. To some people, the inactivity and the monotony might have been nothing.

They were about to kill Billy Bob.

He would have begged if that would make them let him go. Fifteen days for fighting. He had to serve that. And another fifteen if, by next Monday, he couldn't come up with the additional five-hundred-dollar fine Sewell had slapped on him at the last minute for shooting off his mouth.

Fat chance.

Any money Billy got hold of would have to go to Bud, to pay for the damage at the Palace.

Just where was he supposed to get money, anyway? He couldn't work and earn it. not stuck here in jail—but nobody wanted to think about that. And what happened the day he was supposed to be released and they discovered he still couldn't pay Bud? Were they going to give him time to make the money, or was he going to wind up spending the rest of his life in jail?

Surely he didn't deserve all this just because he'd let a streak of contrariness land him in front of Robert Sewell.

His father, the judge.

Billy Bob fought down the wave of bitterness that threatened to swamp him. He wouldn't let it have him; it was the kind of searing, dark emotion that could bring a man down and cripple him for life, and he had the sense to know it.

He kept making himself look the truth in the face: It was his own fault he was in here, just as he'd told Grandpa.

And he must never let the judge have the satisfaction of knowing how much all of this hurt him.

Billy Bob came restlessly to his bare feet, his open shirt flapping carelessly around the bare skin of his sides above his blue jeans as he stared out the window again.

A bass voice in the distant church congregation filled out the chorus of a hymn with exuberance. Resting with his forehead against the chilly metal bars, Billy concentrated on the music, trying to pick out individual voices, wondering if he knew any of them.

"I wasn't going a hundred miles an hour. And I wasn't running from him, T-Tommy. I just thought he was you, trying to drag me back home. I didn't know he was a real cop!"

He knew that voice in a heartbeat. It was clear and angry as it cut across the room, and so distinctly Shiloh Pennington's that for an instant, Billy thought it must be his imagination that had called it up, the result of some subconscious memory from this afternoon when she'd stood free in the sunshine outside his window.