"I can tell." This time her voice worked, and it held amusement. He laughed, too, looking down at his clothes.
"Yeah, I guess you can."
When he began to turn away, she remembered suddenly to tell him, "My name's Shiloh."
He stopped. "Shiloh? Like the Civil War?"
"Papa said it meant 'a place of peace.' He named me." Shiloh stood up, coming to the edge of the porch where the sunlight hit her full force. His eyes widened, startled. "But most people hear it, and then look at me and think of Abraham Lincoln."
He grinned appreciatively, letting his eyes linger on her long brown legs under the khaki shorts. "Well, that's not what comes to my mind," he drawled.
When Shiloh caught his meaning, she flushed in hot confusion. "I didn't—I wasn't—" she stumbled.
Then he looked up into her wide eyes, and what he saw there, she never knew. But his expression altered, his gaze darkening from a teasing flirtatiousness to something more intent, and—she still remembered this with a sense of deep, surprised pleasure—his own face burned red.
"Sorry," he mumbled, and turned away to the truck.
That night, she thought about the way he had looked at her. She didn't like it—and she liked it too much.
The next day Laura caught her watching him from a window; she watched for a minute, too.
"There's nothin' like seein' a man get down and work, especially when he's as fine as that one," she observed sagely. "I reckon he makes a lot of women stop and look. You just remember, Shiloh, that's all you do. Look."
Shiloh stomped down the hall in an embarrassed huff. How many times had Sam and Laura drilled it into her head?
But when Laura took her afternoon nap, Shiloh finally went back out to the porch. This time he knew the minute she stepped out, although they pretended to ignore each other. At last, he went to the canteen he had put with his tools, turned it up and tried to get a drink.
It was empty.
Shiloh knew perfectly well that he could turn on the hose; so did he. In fact, he walked over to it and flipped it on.
But she went to the kitchen anyway, filling a glass with ice and cold water; then she took it back to him, walking up behind him.
"Here," she said.
Startled, he turned, hesitated, then took the glass. "Thanks/*'
She waited as he tilted his head back to drink, aware of the heat pouring off of him, of sweat drenching and staining his muddy T-shirt, making it cling to him like a second skin.
It made her nervous, but when he held the glass out and she moved away, when he called, "Hey, wait," she stopped willingly.
"You don't have to stay inside because of me," he told her brusquely. "Because of yesterday. No more come-ons. I'll shut up."
She had to look up to him, even with her five-foot-seven-inch height, and it struck her again: she liked him, the way his too-long hair under the edge of the cap turned the color of ripe wheat in the sun, the way his voice held laughter, the way his eyes burned blue.
She was eighteen. She could talk to him if she wanted to.
So she laughed and answered boldly, "I came yesterday to try to get you to talk. I thought I got in your way instead."
"Not in mine. And you can talk all day long if you want to. It won't bother me," Billy Bob answered, grinning at her in relief.
So she had. Not all day, but just all afternoon, while Laura slept.
They talked about the work he was doing, about what they had done in the past and wanted to do in the future, about life in her private school and out at Seven Knobs, the tiny community where he lived.
Shiloh looked forward to every afternoon and wondered if Billy Bob felt the same golden, sparkling thread of excitement that ran through her when they were together.
She thought he did.
He made the job last nearly two weeks; on his next-to-last day, she helped him work around the big snowball bushes at the far side of the yard, and when they stumbled over each other, he caught her—and after a second's hesitation, kissed her.
She'd been waiting for it; so had he.
But there was way too much emotion in that one quick kiss, and he pulled away, while she wondered wildly if every kiss was that shattering, or just the first, or just ones with Billy Bob.
"I didn't mean to do that, I swear it," he gasped at last, running his hand back through his hair, leaving a streak of dirt across his forehead.
"Oh." She didn't know what else to say. "I'm sorry."
"What are you sorry about?" he demanded in frustration.
"Because you—you didn't like kissing me," she floundered.
"I didn't say that!"
"It sounded like it to me."
He took a deep, steadying breath. "Look, Shiloh— you're barely eighteen. I'm twenty-three."
"I don't see what difference that makes."
"You don't see because you're a kid. You don't know anything."
Shiloh returned angrily, upset at the way he'd made her feel too much, aggravated by his stubbornness, "Fine, if that's the way you want it. But I've got sense enough to know what I like and what I want. I wanted you to kiss me, and—and I'm sure that I enjoyed it. Wasn't I supposed to?"
He stared at her a moment, his face indecisive, torn— then he reached out and pulled her to him once again, sweat, dirt, and all.
His lips on hers were the sweetest elixir she'd ever known, as addictive as a deadly narcotic. All she could do was reach in a dizzy panic for him, hold on to his wet shirt, while her heart threatened to beat its way into her throat.
Then he jerked himself away, sucking in breath. "I've gotta go," he said desperately. "Now. And I won't be back, either."
"Billy—"
He reached down, grabbed up his fallen cap, and stalked off across the yard, moving so fast she had to ran to catch up with him.
"What did I do?" she asked.
He flung himself into the truck, pausing only a second to look at her in frustration. "You're a whole lot like white lightnin'. You know what that is? It's whiskey. Clear and pure and as innocent-lookin' as water—and it'll knock you flat and leave you dead if you mess around with it too much. I learned early to let it alone, and I can learn to let you alone, too. You're plain trouble."
"But—"
He started the engine viciously, and she said in desperation, "Your tools—you're leaving them. And I'm not trou—"
"Grandpa can get 'em tomorrow," he interrupted, and he sounded angry. Shiloh turned loose of the truck abruptly.
"I don't understand you, Billy Bob. But whatever's wrong, you're a coward, or else you'd try to fix it. So go on—leave."
He did.
Shiloh spent the night crying into her pillow, and the next morning, she looked so terrible that Laura thought she was coming down with a summer virus.
But that afternoon, while Shiloh began to think the tears might start again as she wandered outside, Billy Bob came back. He climbed out of his vehicle reluctantly, stopping cold when he saw her. She faced him slowly, heart pounding.
"I came back for the tools."
"So get them."
He did, but when he was through, he lingered, finally coming up to the back porch, where she'd retreated. "Is your housekeeper—" "She's asleep."
"Oh." He looked down at his boots a minute. "You understand why I have to leave you alone, don't you, Shiloh?"
His face was beseeching when he looked up toward her.
"No," she answered starkly. She didn't see why she should make it easy for him.
"Everything's wrong about it," he explained passionately. "And I'm the first guy you've ever been around.
You told me so yourself."
j
"I talk too much," she managed. "What's that got to do with it?"
He braced a hand on the porch column and looked straight into her eyes. "You might like somebody else a whole lot more than me. I'm just here and handy. The first one you've had to experiment with."
The admission hurt him; his
face was as flushed as it had been on that first day. And it hurt her, too.
"I wasn't 'experimenting,' " she retorted, backing away from him. "Maybe you were."
"Me!"
"If I'm such a baby—" "I didn't say that!"
"No? You make it sound horrible that I don't know many men."
"I don't think it's horrible. I think—I think it's sweet. I think you're sweet. Nice. And . . . wonderful."
"Well, I don't. Think that about you, I mean. I don't like you at all."
There was a long pause while they stared at each other, her angry, him contrite. A fat bumblebee buzzed noisily on the climbing Don Juan roses at the end of the porch, and at last Shiloh dropped her gaze to say in a stifled voice, "That's not true. I didn't mean it."
He twisted away without another word, going down the steps, and stopped three strides down the brick sidewalk. For a moment he stood, his back to her, struggling with himself, and when he turned around again, it was with a mixture of rebellion and resignation.
"I'm crazy for asking, and your old man's liable to kill us if he catches us, but—if you want to, you could meet me down there"—he motioned toward the distant magnolia trees—"around ten tomorrow night. There's a late dance in Martinsville, over in Tobias County. Surely nobody will know you over there—if you want to go, that is."
"T—ten?" she repeated, shakily.
"I won't let anything happen to you, I promise," he concluded, and the promise was written on his face like a banner.
She couldn't speak, so she nodded wordlessly instead, and the tears glistening in her eyes weren't like the ones she'd cried last night. Not at all.
They spent six weeks together, meeting two times a week, three toward the end when they couldn't get enough of each other. Shiloh didn't know how they'd gone from teasing and dancing to these heavy emotions; she just knew she was experiencing the most wonderful time of her life. For the first time, she was on her own. Free, and in love.
Billy Bob didn't seem to understand what had happened either, and there were times when he openly worried about where they were heading. But neither of them seemed able to stop . . . until Sam found out.
Her father confronted her with his knowledge of her fling with Billy Bob in late July—and dragged her down to the magnolias that night to face him.
In thirty minutes, he destroyed a whole summer and a good part of her heart. Billy had finished the job when he'd done just exactly what Sam had predicted.
It hadn't helped her ego any to see Billy Bob with Angie Blake; it had, in fact, hurt like sixty. But it started the final cauterization of her emotions.
When Sam had urged her to reconsider colleges, she knew exactly what he was up to, and still agreed without much resistance, so she wound up in another private school, an expensive, reputable university in Tennessee.
A long way from Billy Bob, virtually under lock and key. Sam would have been completely happy if only the school had forbidden male students to enter. But it didn't, so he checked on her regularly, and then began sending Michael in his place in an obvious matchmaking scheme.
She first met Michael the winter following her summer with Billy Bob, when Robert Sewell and Sam began to get friendly. She had known the first time she ever looked at the judge that he was Billy's father, but Sam had been watching her for a reaction, so she had carefully hidden the hard jolt her heart gave.
She didn't like Sewell, and she never asked herself why. But she got used to his looks, so that by the time she met Michael, she was prepared.
He was everything that Billy Bob wasn't, everything Sam wanted in her husband: successful, socially adept, politically correct.
The first time Sam introduced them, it was almost with an air of triumph. She knew why: He was presenting her with an acceptable male who came packaged almost just like the one he hadn't let her keep.
She didn't tell him that she was over Billy Bob, or that she had dated a few others since at the university without his august permission, just as she didn't tell him how stifled he was making her feel. And if she were honest, she'd have to admit that she had liked Michael in the beginning, before she knew him.
Now here she was back with Billy Bob, despite all of her father's best-laid plans. Maybe because of them. At least she wasn't afraid of Billy. And if it was unflattering to remember how hard she'd had to work to get him to agree to this marriage, it was worth it because she could trust him.
He would do his part.
Shiloh remembered suddenly the animal grace of him as he had paced the cell; it brought back another memory, the way the muscles under his skin once felt to her touch.
Some things hadn't changed, she thought quietly: Billy Bob Walker was still fine to look at. Laura had been right about that from the beginning.
7
Sam was out of town on Saturday. Shiloh spent the day alone and restless, and finally took the car she'd been using all week and went for a drive. The day was calm and still—everything she wasn't.
On Sunday morning, when she came down to breakfast, her father was dressed to go out and waiting for her.
"I don't want you to do something desperate again, Shiloh," he said sardonically, "so I'll tell you in advance. The judge will be here this afternoon. So will Michael. If you choose not to be, that's your business—this time. But you have a wedding in a few weeks, so you'd do well to get over this fit of nerves in the next day or two."
"Why don't you ask him how he felt when he bit me? That was right after he tore my shirt off."
"Shiloh!" Sam's face flamed red in shocked embarrassment, and she felt her own cheeks blaze at the words that hurt and anger pulled from her.
Then she turned and ran upstairs.
♦ ♦ ♦
"Billy! Billy Bob!"
He came awake with a start, the hot rays of the afternoon sun making his face burn. The jail cell was stuffy and too warm.
"Billy!"
Pulling himself up groggily from the cot, he tried to find the voice. He knew it already, but Shiloh was not at the bars to the cell. Then she called again, and he realized with surprise that she was outside the window.
"Shiloh?"
There she stood, in the empty' parking lot, looking up at his window. But this was not deja vu—there was no red Porsche, and today she had on tight, leggy blue jeans, and her face looked as if she'd been crying. She'd changed her mind—he already knew.
"Were you asleep?"
"Must have been," he answered slowly. "What's wrong?"
"Is it—is it still on for tomorrow?" She swallowed heavily, glancing away. "You mean—" "Our getting married."
He took a long, considering breath. Now was his own chance to cut and run.
"If you still want to do it, it is," he answered instead.
"I still want to," she answered resolutely. "But when?"
"I'll give T-Tommy the money first thing in the morning. After he gets over the shock, I guess he'll have to do things—fill out papers, I don't know. I'll meet you as soon as I can." A little rush of effervescent excitement shot through him, a tiny, quicksilver stiletto of anticipation that slid through his ribs.
"But where? I've already told Mr. Parsons I wouldn't be in tomorrow. Family matters, I said. He won't dare question that," Shiloh told him with a trace of irony. "Now, where? We don't want to be seen."
Why not, he wanted to ask. Instead, he pondered a minute.
"Where are we going to do it?" he asked. "I thought—Memphis. It's a big city. Nobody will notice us."
He frowned. "You've got a point. So, meet me out at the old gin. You can park in the back. Nobody will see anything. I'll come as soon as ... as I get out."
She nodded, then raked her hair back from her face.
She definitely had been crying.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Billy Bob asked her roughly. "I'm sure."
"Then what in the hell have you been crying about?" Her hands went to her cheeks in confusion, then she dropped them. "All brides cry
," she said flippantly.
The deserted old cotton gin leaned precariously to the right, a giant, graying skeleton of lumber nearly hidden from the road by a heavy stand of emerald pine trees. The morning air was pungent with the sharp tang of the pine needles.
Once the two-lane asphalt highway that ran past the gin had bustled with business, but a newer road to the north had since turned this one into a leisurely local thoroughfare, so somnolent that farmers on tractors or pulling hay wagons felt comfortable ambling down it.
When Billy Bob turned the truck off the highway and into the gravel road leading behind the gin, no one saw him. He felt a little silly even checking, but then this whole business had a clandestine feel to it that made him act like James Bond.
She was waiting for him when he pulled in, leaning up against a small blue Cadillac—-it was Sam's brand of car— in a pair of dark sunglasses that made her look remote. She wore white, too, though it was hardly bridal. Shiloh's gleaming, snowy suit boasted a jacket whose lapels veed sharply, deeply downward, revealing the hollow between her breasts and making Billy wonder nervously if she was wearing anything at all under it.
Her long legs ended in high white heels that pushed her feet into delicate arches, and his eyes lingered on them before he turned off the motor and climbed out, a sudden dark reluctance in him as he faced the girl who was straightening off her car.
The truth hit him hard: This icy fashion plate with the perfect hair and elegant legs and designer clothes was a stranger. He didn't like the way she looked; she made him feel like a welfare case in his jeans and white shirt. And somehow the contrast between the two of them made it clear that it really was just a business proposition, an ugly one: one rich lady buying herself a commodity—him.
"Sorry I'm late," he told her abruptly, as she took a step toward him. "I gave the money to T-Tommy and his mouth dropped open so far he tripped over it. The old buzzard put me through the wringer tryin' to figure out where I got it."
Billy Bob Walker Got Married Page 11
