Read Online The Invitation by Jude Deveraux - Free Book Online

little mouth and did it, then dog-paddled over to her in the water. She was tempted to not say one word of congratulations, but then she grinned at him and winked. She was rewarded with one of Billy’s rare smiles.
    They were better friends after that. Jackie taught him to swim and allowed him to help her around her house. Billy, who spoke only when he had something to say, said that Jackie’s house was more fun than his. In his house the servants got to do everything, but at hers the people got to do the good stuff themselves.
    â€œThat’s one way of looking at it,” she’d said.
    Billy’s mother was the one who suggested that he ask Jackie to go to the movies with him. Jackie, who had no money for such frivolities, was thrilled—until she saw the most handsome boy in her class outside the theater. She stopped to say hello to him, but Billy put his little body between them and told the six-foot-tall teenager that Jackie was his date and he should get lost—if he knew what was good for him. It was six months before the ribbing at school stopped. The other kids were merciless in teasing her about her three-foot-tall bodyguard who was going to bruise their kneecaps with his fists. “Do you pick him up to kiss him good night, Jackie?” they taunted.
    By the time Billy was seven the townspeople referred to him as Jackie’s Shadow. He was with her whenever possible, and no matter what she did she couldn’t make him stop following her. She yelled at him, told him what she thought of him, even tried telling him she hated him, but he was still always there.
    One day when she was seventeen, a boy walked her home from school. They stopped by the mailbox for a moment, and as the boy reached out to remove a leaf from Jackie’s hair, out of the bushes sprang little seven-year-old Billy, as wild as a wet cat, launching himself at the unsuspecting boy. Jackie, of course, wanted to die. She pulled Billy off the boy and tried to apologize, but the boy was embarrassed because Billy had knocked him flat into the dirt road. The next day at school everyone gleefully renewed taunting Jackie about her midget lover whom she kept hidden in the bushes.
    Billy’s mother, a sweet woman, heard of the fracas and came to apologize to Jackie, justifying her youngest son’s actions by saying, “He loves you so much, Jackie.” That was not what she wanted to hear at seventeen. She wanted to hear that the captain of the football team loved her, not some kid half size.
    She wouldn’t speak to Billy for three weeks after that episode, but she relented when she woke up one morning and found him asleep on the porch swing. He’d climbed out of his bedroom window sometime during the night and waited for the milk truck to arrive. After hiding himself among the milk cans, he got out when the driver stopped at Jackie’s house, where he curled up into a ball on the hard slats of the swing and fell asleep. When Jackie saw him, she said that he was a curse of the magnitude of the plagues of Egypt, but her mother thought Billy was cute.
    Billy had been tagging along behind her the day she met Charley and fell in love with the airplanes.
    Billy had said, “Do you love airplanes more than you love me?”
    â€œI love mosquito bites better than I love you,” she’d answered.
    Billy, as usual, said nothing, which always made her feel worse than if he’d yelled or screamed or cried like other kids. But Billy was an odd little boy, more like an old man in a kid’s body than an actual child.
    When she ran away from home with Charley, she was too cowardly to face her mother, so she left her a note. But she was halfway to the airfield when, impulsively, she ran back. She caught a ride with a man she knew, and he dropped her off at Billy’s house, where a birthday party was going on. Most of Billy’s eleven brothers and sisters, along with most of the children of