Octo BEAR fest (Renaissance Shifters #1)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

T hose were not the words Bill wanted to hear himself say to Gwen Booker. He wanted to hear himself say you're magnificent, you're beautiful, you're exciting, I want to pick you up and hug you ? —

A bear hug? his bear asked excitedly. It was a pretty laid-back soul animal, from what Bill could tell about other shifters' animals, but it loved hugs. Really truly loved them. And it had never quite gotten its fuzzy head around the idea that a bear hug from an actual bear was very alarming to humans, since they used the phrase so affectionately. 'He gave me a bear hug when we saw each other again! I missed him so much!' That kind of thing. His bear was absolutely convinced humans wanted nothing more than to hug it , in its huge, furry, claw-y, dangerous natural form.

A bear hug, he agreed somewhat reluctantly. But a human one, buddy, okay?

The bear, somewhere between sullen and sad, mumbled, It's not a bear hug then. It's a human hug, and mooped back into silence. Bill genuinely felt sorry for it.

"Look, it's not your fault," he said, half to the bear and also entirely to Gwen. "I'm the one who screwed up by booking you. It's just our clientele…" He sank into his seat and rubbed his hands over his face.

"You run a brewhouse," Gwen said hopefully. "You must have a lot of people who like rock?"

Sinking in his chair wasn't enough. Bill actually felt a need to lean forward and put his head against the desk, thumping it a few times for good measure. "You'd think," he said hollowly, to his feet, which he could see now, what with his forehead being on the desk. "And I don't know, maybe we do. But my folks—they started the brewhouse—they made October Jazz a thing in this town. There's a whole festival next week. We kind of launch it with the Oktoberfest weekend here at the pub, and then…yeah…"

He dared to glance up, and found Gwen's whole expression basically turned upside-down in consternation. "Oh. Oh, yeah, that's bad then. You have…oh, God. You probably have tickets sold for Gwendolyn Brooker, too, don't you?"

"So many tickets. She's astonishing, really, unbelievable on the horns, plays piano, sings, just basically a one-woman wonder. I've listened to all of her albums and honestly, getting her was actually kind of a coup—oh. Oh, no wonder she was available. It was because I booked you. I mean. I'm sorry, but…it was because I booked you."

Gwen winced. "I'm a working musician, but…yeah, I'm afraid I'm not so solidly booked up that it'd be any kind of miracle to get me. Sorry about that."

"No, no." Bill sat back up again, pulling his hands down his face. "Not your fault. I got so excited that you—she—was available I didn't check carefully enough, obviously. I should have known I'd need to go through a manager. I think I just found your website, though." He reached for his phone, typing in gwendolyn brooker , and the first thing that came up was a dot-com for Gwen Booker. Two results later was a social media presence for Gwendolyn Brooker. With a mortified groan, he turned the phone toward Gwen to show her. "Yep. I took the first hit and didn't realize it wasn't the same person."

Gwen reached across the desk and took his phone like she had every business doing so, flicking through the search results. "In your defense, a decent manager would have her website structured so that mistake couldn't possibly happen, but it looks like her actual domain name lapsed ages ago. I know it makes me a weird old fogey, but I think businesses should have active websites that aren't on social media."

"You are neither old nor weird," Bill said, surprising himself with his passion, and surprising Gwen even more. She laughed and shook her head.

"Not that old. Kind of weird, though. Definite fogey, in terms of online presence. My mom was, is, a web designer," she added with an explanatory wave of her hand. "She has whole hours-long rants about how you shouldn't let a handful of billionaire-owned social media companies define your entire online presence. I guess some of it's rubbed off. I have a band , Bill. If it was just me, I'd be willing to try to figure something out to help you here, but there are four more people counting on this gig. Also, didn't you notice you were booking a band and not just an individual?"

"Gwendolyn Brooker has a band, too," Bill said helplessly. "I was surprised it was only the five of you, in fact. I thought it would be seven."

"Oh, well." Gwen threw her hands upward. Her fingernails were painted black, and the polish was chipped. It was, Bill thought, the sexiest nail polish he'd ever seen. Everything about Gwen Booker was throbbingly hot, including the baffled empathy currently writ large across her face. "You really blew it," she said sympathetically. "How are we gonna make this work? My band will be here tomorrow."

"I don't know. I'm going to have to tell my parents, and call everybody who's got a ticket?—"

"You must be able to email them, or text," Gwen interrupted incredulously. "Are your sales through one of the online vendors?"

"Most of them." Bill blinked at her as she made another explosive gesture. Apparently she did nothing by halves, including waving her hands around.

"All right, look. So yes, the first thing you have to do is let people know. I'd start by offering a discount for having booked the wrong person but if they want to come anyway, like, here's five bucks off, or a free beer. Free beer would be easier, actually. I bet a shit ton of people will show up anyway just for the beer. Send everybody a voucher with a QR code for a free beer, and let them know their tickets will be refunded or they can cancel if that's what they'd rather. And I know I've already got some Fits coming to the show?—"

"Some what?"

Gwen flashed a smile of those wine-red lips, and Bill thought she could wreck him with that mouth. By smiling! By smiling , he told himself, and tried extremely hard not to think about what he might otherwise have meant.

Extremely hard was the operative term at the moment, though. Thank God he was sitting behind the desk.

"The Fits. Our fans. The band is the Sixty Pix, the fans say they pitch sixty fits when they see us, they ended up calling themselves 'The Fits,'" Gwen said ruefully. "It's silly, but it's unique, at least. Anyway, so if we can get an idea of how many people might show up anyway I can offer some kind of 'hey meet the artist' thing to pull some of my fans from farther away than they might otherwise come, even on short notice. Last minute and weekend getaway tickets should be available about now anyway. Now, what's the music scene like in Renaissance, anyway? Jazzy, apparently, but there's got to be more than just jazz here, right?"

"I…have no idea?"

Gwen Booker gave him a hard stare. And there was that word again, hard. Bill really needed to avoid it. He swallowed and tried not to squirm under Gwen's grim expression. "You don't know anything about the music scene in the town you live in?"

"I don't think there is much of one?" Bill hesitated. "No, there must be. My brothers go out a lot. I just…don't."

"Don't go out?"

He gestured at the office, but meant the whole brewpub with the motion. A much smaller motion than Gwen would have made, he thought, but if he waved his hands around like she did, he'd knock lights out of their sockets and break windows. "Not really, no. I keep this place running, and that's about all I have time for."

She really had a magnificent stare. It rivaled his mother's for the what the hell, Bill ? it implied. Unlike his mother, though, after a moment's consideration, Gwen's cut-glass blue gaze softened and she said, "Then we're going to have to get you out of here and check it out."

"Check what out?"

"Renaissance, Colorado!" Gwen made another of those expansive gestures and grinned at him. "The music scene specifically, but look, we've got a day and a half to turn this around, and we can't do that from inside an office where we don't know anything about the territory! Let's make this happen, big man!"

A twitch went through Bill's…soul…at the phrase big man, and he was pretty sure a blush hit him for the second time in fifteen minutes. Gwen's grin got wider. Much, much wider. Bill blushed harder, until he was sure he would no longer embarrass himself if he stood up. That was something, at least. "You're…are you real?"

She's real, his bear said happily. She's our mate. She's exactly what you need.

Bill was almost certain that was true. He loved his family, all of them, but not even his parents were as take-charge as Gwen Booker seemed to be, and it felt like Bill had been transported to the Twilight Zone. He'd just been desperately wishing that somebody in his life would want to get things done as much as he did.

He just hadn't expected that person to be a wrong hire who came bursting through the door, destined to be the love of his life.

Gwen made a show of pinching herself in a couple places, then raised her dark eyebrows at him. "Pretty sure I'm real. C'mon, let's get that update out to everybody who's bought tickets. Do you know how to make a QR code? Obviously not," she said to his expression. "All right, let me at it." She sprang out of her chair, rubbed her bottom, and made a face at the chair as she came around to Bill's side of the desk. "Up. Or let me sit in your lap, your call."

Bill scrambled out of his chair so fast it was embarrassing, but he would absolutely not be responsible for his body's responses if she sat in his lap, and this was enough of a disaster already. He had no idea how he would explain to this literal rock star of a woman that he, boring old Bill Torben, brewhouse master and general stick-in-the-mud, was meant to be with her for the rest of their lives. Or that he could turn into an incredibly enormous grizzly bear, for that matter, but honestly, that seemed less unlikely than her wanting to stay with him forever.

Gwen plonked down in his chair. "Oh, that's much more comfortable. My ass isn't going to be perforated by springs, in this chair. Okay, what's your computer passwo—" The question dissolved into an 'uh' and a burst of laughter and Gwen pushed back from the desk, waving at the computer. "Sorry, I'm not actually that rude. Or I am, but I caught myself in time. Mostly. Please put your password in?"

Bill lurched forward and typed his password in with the largest, clumsiest hands that had ever existed. It took him four tries. It wasn't even a hard password. He stepped back again, actually shaking with effort, and with the warm, slightly spicy scent of Gwen Booker in his nose. She smelled so good. He wanted to put his nose in her neck and just breathe for about a week.

Instead he pretended he was a perfectly normal human being who didn't do weird things like that, and said, "There?" hopefully.

"Great, okay, let me just generate a coupon code to link the QR code to, and then…no, just a one-off, you piece of electronic horseshooooe." Her gaze flickered to him as she avoided swearing, as if he might be horribly shocked by her using an actual curse word. He sucked his cheeks in, trying not to laugh, and her gaze darkened with obviously-mocking threat before she turned her attention back to the computer. "Okay, look, I'm going to associate it with the brewpub's website, okay? You've got one, right?" Gwen's hands flew over the keyboard, filling things out, creating stuff Bill had no idea how to do, typing notes and drafts and finally sitting back with an, "Et voila! All right, we've just got to send it to the ticket vendor to propagate. You want to take a look at what I've done first?"

"I can see you've spelled everything right," Bill said faintly. "I'm not sure there's anything else I'm capable of doing besides gawking in appreciation."

She laughed and submitted the draft she'd written. "Okay then. That's stage one of 'Save Oktoberfest' underway. Stage two is seeing what this town's got to offer and where we can advertise locally!" She stood up with the same energy she'd demonstrated doing everything else, and Bill had a sudden, vivid interest in how she would express that energy in bed.

Which was so far from an okay thing to be thinking he actually kicked himself in his own shin. His bear, startled, said, Ow! even though it hadn't really hurt, and Bill mumbled a silent, half-hearted apology to the offended animal. Gwen, having seen the whole kicking himself thing, blinked at him in confusion, and Bill shook his head. "Nothing. It's just that you're the most amazing women I've ever met."

Gwen Booker looked him up and down with a smile that bordered on a leer, then winked. "Oh, honey, you ain't seen nothing yet."