Read Billy Bob Walker Got Married for Free Online Page B

parted on the best of terms. She'd proven where her loyalty lay and it hadn't been with him. And if the knowledge had made him furious—at least at the time—it had to make her defensive now when he was around.
    He'd worn out his emotions for her; now the only thing that fueled his desire to get back at Shiloh was just the sense of satisfaction that he'd at last forced her to face him and had wrung deep-gut, honest anger from her— that, and the outrage that ran through him every time he remembered that she was about to marry the one man with whom he most hated to see her: his half brother, Michael.
    Moving from the window that still held a lingering memory of the girl and the red car. Billy Bob slumped down on the edge of the narrow bunk, where he propped his elbows on his worn jeans and dropped his face into his hands, trying to forget.
    Robert Sewell was there, in his head, where he had been ever since Billy Bob was six years old and some kid out at tiny Seven Knobs Elementary had called him "bastard," repeating exactly what an adult had no doubt said. He'd gone home crying, demanding to know what it meant—and he'd made Mama cry, too.
    He hadn't understood all of the truth when she told it to him, but between the shame in her face and the anger in Grandpa's, he'd realized enough to at least understand why he didn't have a father at home.
    As he grew older, he came to accept and even see what lay behind Sewell's total denial of everything. The man had always completely ignored the illegitimate son growing up on the farm fifteen miles north of Sweetwater, twenty-eight miles from Laurel Hill, the Sewell estate. It was the only way Sewell could cope with the fact that he'd once forgotten himself and his place enough to have seduced a backward, shy little country girl like Ellen Walker and then walked away from her.
    It must have been gall to the judge when Billy Bob began to look more and more like him and his legitimate son every passing day; it had been bitter enough for Billy to take when he looked in his own mirror.
    And to watch Michael have everything Billy couldn't just made it worse. One son was the canker in his father's life; the other was the apple of his eye.
    Now Shiloh was with Michael. It didn't matter, Billy told himself firmly. He didn't love her anymore; in fact, he hated her. But the knowledge didn't help. Seeing her—her, of all people—in the local newspaper's wedding announcement section a few weeks ago with Michael had burned like salt in an open sore.
    Maybe Billy's fury had led him to clash headlong at last with Robert in the courtroom.
    Which brought him back full-circle to the judge, he thought in frustrated anger, pushing himself restlessly up off the bunk.
    "Hey, you got a visitor," Davis McKee, the young, redheaded deputy, called back to him from the open door which led from the dingy cell area out to the offices.
    "Yeah? Who?"
    "Your grandpa, that's who. Go on in, Mr. Walker."
    Billy went slowly to the bars as Willie Walker entered, approaching stiffly with the aid of a dark, heavy cane. The stroke the old man had suffered more than two years ago wouldn't quite turn loose of him no matter how he fought; the doctors had decided he would be crippled for the rest of his life.
    But then, they didn't know Willie Walker, Billy thought with an unexpected surge of affection as he watched the white-haired man in the faded overalls and carefully starched high-buttoned white shirt—his "town" shirt—advance slowly toward him. Those same doctors had once said he'd never walk at all.
    He halted in front of the bars and looked up at the grandson who stood a full head taller. "Well," he drawled at last, "I see you ain't gone nowhere since the last time I was here."
    "Gone stir-crazy, that's about all," Billy Bob retorted unevenly, and he tried to ignore the feelings of guilt the old man's presence stirred inside him. He should be on the farm, helping him.
    "It'll do it to you," Willie agreed, looking