Octo BEAR fest (Renaissance Shifters #1)

Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

O n second thought, Bill realized, they should have just turned right around and gone back to his house, or Gwen's hotel. It was only about one in the afternoon when the other hikers interrupted them, but for some damn reason, he thought finishing the hike was a better idea than cutting it short and taking the afternoon to themselves.

The funny thing was, Gwen apparently thought so too, because when they got up to the trail's summit, she suddenly blurted, "We're idiots. We could have gone back to the hotel," which made Bill laugh out loud, the sound bouncing around the rocks and trees.

"I was just thinking that. I guess I just got it in my head that we were going on a hike and the only way to finish that was to actually finish it. It was way shorter to go back than finish by going around."

She slid her hand, small and warm, into Bill's. "At least we're the same kind of idiot. And this has been nice. Not that going back to the hotel wouldn't have been, but…" She sighed. "For a woman who lives in Denver, a notoriously get-outside-and-do-stuff city, I don't really get outside all that much. I'm either at work or rehearsing. So this has probably been really good for me, even if," she lifted a knee up and down, making a face, "even if my butt and legs are wondering what the hell I'm doing. I haven't walked up this many hills in ages. And now we have to walk down them again!"

"Your job must be pretty flexible?" They started down the trail as it bent back toward the distant parking lot.

"More flexible than my butt, man. Ow. I'm not going to be able to bounce around on stage tonight." Gwen didn't sound like she meant a word of the complaints as she moved ahead of Bill on the trail. Her butt looked just fine from his vantage. Better than fine, in fact. She had a great round little ass that had fit into his hands wonderfully, and it was probably just as well he hadn't thought to depants her before picking her up, because those hikers showing up would have really gotten an eyeful in that case. She called, "It's a part-time job except if there's a crunch. They're a fulfillment business and mostly only need somebody to answer phones in the mornings, although it gets crazy around the holidays, obviously. So they're usually cool with me taking a long weekend most of the year, and sometimes I just have the office phone forwarded to mine for a few hours every day so I can work remotely anyway."

"An ideal job for a rock star," Bill called back as she skipped a little ahead. She was a dark streak in the golden leaves and soft autumn light, bouncing from one step to another like someone who spent a lot more time outdoors than she claimed she did. He felt unbelievably content just watching her, as if he could spend the rest of his life doing exactly that and think it was a life well lived.

That reminded him, suddenly and wonderfully, of his parents, and he found himself grinning like an idiot the whole rest of the way back to the truck. "Is the pub okay? You'll want your car."

"And a shower," Gwen agreed. "I didn't take one last night because I knew we were going hiking this morning. I'm surprised you can't smell me from halfway across the state." Her eyes widened. " Can you?"

"Only from a couple miles."

Gwen snapped her gaze around to him and he spread his hands. "Bears have great senses of smell. Humans aren't nearly as good, but shifters do mostly scent and hear better than true humans."

"Holy crap! Oh my God! I'll remember to stay showered!"

"You smell good," he assured her. "You smell great, in fact."

"Nope. Showering. Now, forever, always. Well, not now. But once we're back in town. And I would invite you to join me, but," she sighed, "exercise early in the day before a concert is good for me. Exercise late in the day is less good, but better than nothing. Both, however, would wipe me out."

"Oh, you think I'd exercise you?"

Gwen looked him up and down as they climbed into his truck and dropped her voice into a purr. "Big man, I'm counting on it."

She likes us, his bear informed him with enthusiasm.

Bill groaned aloud, both agreeing with the bear and acknowledging Gwen's flirting. "Are you sure we can't go back to your hotel? Or my house?"

"I'm sure I'm trying to make good decisions for the show tonight," Gwen said, not very convincingly, though she followed it with a snort. "Penny would actually murder me if I showed up low-energy tonight."

"Okay, that seems pretty likely," Bill admitted. "She's fierce."

"She really is. We met at an audition for somebody else's band and she was like 'screw these guys, let's make an all-girl band of our own.' I didn't know she'd recognized me for two years. The woman can keep a secret."

"That's impressive. But, er, Myles?"

"Came with Gemma. Package deal. He's the only guy we've ever had in the lineup. I'd say he has big feminine energy, but it's not true. He is a tech genius, though, and the band is lucky to have him. Oh, my God." That was as they approached the pub, which actually had a crowd gathered, sitting on benches that had magically appeared in the parking lot, as far as Bill could tell. "That can't be for the show tonight. There must be a hundred of them already."

"I'm pretty sure it can be. Um, do you want to go in there? You might never get out again."

"I think I'd better not," Gwen said, wide-eyed. "Can you drive me to the hotel? I'll get a lift back over with Penny before the show, but holy crap, Bill, what have we done?"

"I think you might have broken out," Bill said honestly. "The Sixty Pix have escaped containment. That's amazing, Gwen."

"I was not planning for this."

"Life is what happens when we're making plans, right?" Bill drove past the pub and stole a kiss when he dropped Gwen off outside the hotel. "I'll text you directions to the back parking lot where the staff park. I think you guys should come in that way tonight. I'm going to go back and start setting up security and…" He trailed off, thinking of the number of people already hanging out at the pub. "And see if I can call anybody else to help cover tonight. You know, I think you might have changed my life, Gwen."

"Seems fair." She paused in the truck door, smiling at him. "Because I think you've changed mine, too." She blew him a kiss, and was gone.

Bill watched where she'd gone for a moment, smiling and shaking his head. He thought she'd changed his life? No, he knew it. But fated mates was still a lot to drop into a casual conversation, and she was right. That part of the conversation could wait. She'd accepted him as a bear; the rest of it was working out the details.

He took the route back to the pub that he was going to send the band, and parked in the back lot. His parents' vehicle was there, along with a couple of the cousins' cars and more staff vehicles than he would have expected. He went inside to semi-organized chaos, and his cousin Ashley flagged him down. "Hey, cuz. I knew you had a date this morning, so when people started showing up I thought I'd take the bull by the horns and called in some reinforcements."

"I'm going to have to back-date your starting date and give you a raise and a promotion. How does 'Head Boss Manager of the World' sound as a job title?"

"I'll want business cards with that." Ashley grinned like she didn't believe Bill had meant it, and went off to order his younger brothers around, yelling, "Hey, your parents are in the event room!" to Bill over her shoulder.

"So I take it you don't need me in here right now," Bill said under his breath. He was definitely hiring her with a raise already built in, whether she believed him or not. He grabbed a root beer—the one non-alcoholic drink the brewery also made—and went to the event room, which could be used either for private events or spillover space if the rest of the pub filled up. They'd opened it the night before, and Bill knew they'd be opening it tonight, too.

For the moment, though, his parents were slouched comfortably in a couch in there together, drinking coffee and chatting. They both looked up as he came in, and his mother smiled fondly at him. "Hello, sweetheart. I'm so proud of you."

"Oh good. Thanks. Why?" Bill dropped into the couch across from them and put his root beer on the table, watching bubbles rise.

"For this transition," his mother said in surprise. "We had no idea you were taking the pub this direction."

Bill blinked. "Um. Uh. What?"

"Oh, come on, sweetheart. We really believed it, you know. When you posted to the family chat and said you'd messed up the booking, we thought you were serious. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't panic. You don't make mistakes like that."

"I—"

"But you can't really believe us to expect you put crowds like this together literally overnight," his father went on, oblivious to Bill's faint protests. "I wish you'd felt comfortable letting us know you were going to try something new, but this has been a terrific effort, Bill. I know jazz and the Renaissance Jazz Festival were always your mother's and my thing, but I didn't realize rock was such a passion of yours. That young woman is a real star. How long have you been a fan of hers?"

Bill opened his mouth and shut it again.

"She certainly seems to like you, too." His mom's eyes sparkled. "It might not be fate, baby, but maybe you've found somebody worth your time?"

"It is fate, actually," Bill said with a stupid little grin.

Both his parents jolted upright, his mom visibly suppressing a squeal. "What? Really? Really , Bill?"

"Yeah." His smile grew, almost embarrassed. "I haven't told her yet. I did tell her—I showed her—my bear, which she, well, you know, there was a lot of swearing and staring, but that seems reasonable, right? I was going to tell her the rest of it but we got interrupted." By almost having sex. He was nearly forty, but he didn't feel the need to mention that to his parents.

"Oh my God! It's about time!" His mother clapped her hands together, and his dad gave her a fond, exasperated look.

"Heather. You can't rush fate."

"Yes, yes, I know, but it's still about time! Bill! Sit down and tell us everything!" His mother pointed imperiously at the couch he was already sitting on. Both he and his father laughed, and she hmph ed in mock insult.

"I don't know what to tell you, Mom. She blew in like a hurricane on Thursday and I just knew. I've been following her around making moon eyes ever since." He decided not to mention his absolute certainty that Gwen's arrival spelled disaster for the pub, because it seemed he'd been more wrong about that than anything in his entire life. "She played a publicity gig at the Harlequin on Thursday and Mike Piccolo—he says hi, by the way—said her band was on the verge of a breakout. I think he might be right. I think this might be the weekend that changes everything."

His parents were both beaming as they said, "That's wonderful, " in chorus. A heartbeat later, though, his mother moved on to all the implications of that, things Bill had barely even let himself think about yet, and her face fell. "Oh. That's…complicated. I mean, what about the pub, Bill?"

"What about the pub?" his dad asked, baffled, then followed his mother's train of thought. "Oh. Oh, so she's going to be…traveling a lot? What does that mean for you, Bill? For the pub?"

"I literally haven't thought about it. I haven't had time. I…" Bill swallowed. "It might not mean anything. I don't know. I don't know at all."

"We can come back from Tucson for a while," his mom said dubiously. "But with this new direction you're taking things, it'll be a step backward to have us running the place again. This is your business now, Bill."

The impulse to just say I don't want it rose up in him so strongly Bill bit his tongue. It wasn't exactly true. He loved running the actual brewery. The pub was the part he found exhausting. After a long moment, hoping he could trust his voice, he managed to say, "Let me think about things a little, Mom. Dad. The past couple days have been a lot. The truth is I think I need someone else to manage the pub anyway."

Confusion filled his parents' eyes. Bill forged ahead, trying to speak clearly but also quickly enough that they couldn't interrupt and start to argue. "I was talking to Ashley earlier and she pointed out that I've been trying to do two jobs for the last five years. You two used to share the work I'm doing alone. I hadn't thought of it like that, and it…" To his horror, his throat tightened with the threat of tears. He cleared it and tried to continue. "It helped me understand some of why I've felt so overwhelmed. I don't want to disappoint either of you, but I can't keep doing two full time jobs."

"Baby," his mother said in astonishment. "I didn't, we didn't know you were feeling this way. Why didn't you say something?"

His father exhaled heavily. "Because he didn't want to disappoint us, Heather. And to be fair," he said to Bill, "I never quite thought of it that way either. Your mother spent a lot of time raising you kids, but we only had the brewery when you were really little, and you were a big help with your brothers by the time we opened the pub. By the time the pub became a going concern, she was able to do most of the brewery management while I got the pub off the ground. I knew we were a partnership. I didn't think about how handing it over to you meant giving you two jobs to fill by yourself. I'm sorry, son."

"What about your brothers?" Bill's mother still sounded mystified. "They help out, don't they?"

Bill sighed. "They spend April through September doing ren faires, Mom. Sometimes March through October. They're great promotion for the brewery. Between their efforts and Steve out in New York we've expanded our customer base across half the country now. But…" He remembered how Ashley had phrased it, and echoed that: "They do what they're asked. They don't seem to see slack that needs to be picked up, much less do that."

His mother's mouth tightened. "That's inexcusable. I raised them to be more responsible than that."

"You raised our oldest son, Mr Responsibility, and our second-oldest, who left town to go have his own responsibilities instead of tending to the family's," his dad said wryly. "I suspect Bill's been picking up slack for his younger brothers for most of his life, Heather. Older siblings tend to. Which you know. And so do I."

Bill was grateful his father had said it so he didn't have to, and even more grateful that someone noticed . "It's fine," he said quietly. "I just can't keep doing it on my own, and if Jon and Laurie don't want to, I need to find someone else. It's not going to be Gwen," he said almost fiercely. "She's got an incredible career right at her fingertips and there's no way I'm going to ask her to give that up."

"And I think we need to consider the possibility that you'll go to support her," his father said just as quietly.

Bill's heart lurched. He hadn't really let himself think about that, either. His mother's jaw fell open, complex emotions dancing over her face as considered the idea. Then she inhaled. "I suppose we really might need to look at coming back from Tucson, then."

"I don't know, Mom. Ashley's out there taking over right now, running Jon and Laurie and everybody else like a pro. I've already offered her a job twice, but I don't think she believes me. Just…this is all really new. I need some time to think about things. Okay?"

"Of course." His father spoke again, then offered a smile very like Jon's crooked one. "I'm sorry you didn't tell us about this before, Bill, but I'm glad it's out in the open now. And I'm thrilled for you. Gwen is a hell of a woman."

Bill felt his smile go silly with joy. "A literal rock star. Completely out of my league."

"She most certainly is not!" his mother said indignantly. "A good, solid, reliable, kind man like you? Most rock stars should be so lucky!"

Bill laughed and stood so he could kiss his mom on the cheek. "Not that you're in any way biased."

"I'm not!" She looked even more indignant as both her husband and son laughed. "I'm not! I'm absolutely right! Aren't I, Pete?"

"You are," Bill's father agreed. "But that doesn't mean you're not biased."

"I am not!"

Bill, feeling lighter than he had in months, left his parents to their good-natured disagreement, and went to find his fated mate.