Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

T hat had not gone as planned.

Bill was still looking at pictures of 'Emma Hart'—on his own phone now, since Gwen had taken hers back—when she came out of the bathroom with her makeup applied, but when he glanced up to see if he saw the child star in the rock musician, it turned out that all he really saw was his fated mate. She was strong and gorgeous and had been through far more than he'd ever imagined, and come out as this incredible woman he was clearly destined to fall wildly in love with.

And he had completely failed to tell her he was a shifter.

"Gwen—"

"So I emailed—oh. Yes?" Gwen stopped her burst of enthusiastic speech that ran over his, her pale eyes carefully bright. It was as if she'd applied armor as well as the makeup. She'd almost said as much, talking about how she'd cut her hair, dyed it, and learned whole different makeup styles from what she'd been like as a kid. He thought about her 'Day Job Gwen' picture on her driver's license, and how even that woman was a far cry from the waif of a girl she'd been famous as. It was all armor, in its way, and the last thing Bill wanted was to give her another reason to get defensive now. It would be one thing if he had some idea of how she'd react to learning his secret, but even though his bear—and every shifter he knew who'd found their mate—said it would be fine , trusting that in the moment was much scarier than Bill had imagined.

"You go first," he said with a smile. "You're in there doing double duty getting makeup on and emailing people while I'm out here twiddling my thumbs, so hit me up."

She laughed, which was good. Maybe she wasn't too upset about confessing her secrets to him. "I emailed a poster over to the print shop in town and asked for a rush job. It turns out my new friend Ripley works there during the day, so by the time we get over there, they should have a hot stack of flyers ready for us to paper Renaissance with."

"I'm half afraid we're going to end up with a crowd too big for the pub," Bill confessed.

Gwen tossed her hair, which she'd dried into the same kind of spiky ponytail she'd been wearing yesterday, and sparkled those amazing eyes at him. "Then I guess I'll have to come back to play Renaissance again. I'm not busy next weekend."

Bill's heart lurched so hard he stood up like he couldn't contain the feeling. Then he felt silly for the sudden motion, and couldn't figure out what to do with himself. He managed to say, "Don't tempt me. I could book you every weekend for a year and not get enough of you."

Her eyebrows quirked and a funny little smile, almost like a question, formed on her lips before she glanced down, shrugged a bit, and glanced back up at him. "Only weekends?"

"I didn't want to presume?" He wanted to do much, much more than presume, and he wanted it all to start like they'd begun on the couch, but he still couldn't figure out how to blurt 'by the way, sometimes I'm a bear' without sounding like a complete lunatic.

Shift, his bear said mellowly. That'll prove it.

That would scare her! And bears don't fit in hotel rooms very well!

How do you know? the bear asked curiously. We've never shifted in one before.

That was true, and made Bill chuckle despite his feeling of awkwardness. Trust me. We'd knock over the coffee table, and probably shred the furniture.

The bear looked around, and allowed that the coffee table, at least, seemed like it would be endangered. Let's go to the woods, then.

There was no way the bear would really understand why large human men didn't suggest taking small—or medium or large, for that matter—human women into the woods less than a day after meeting them. You'll just have to trust me, he said again. That kind of thing doesn't seem as great to humans as it does to bears.

A mighty sigh met this remark, but the bear settled down, and Bill discovered Gwen was at the door, waiting for him with a look of amusement. He wondered if she would still be amused if she found out he was debating a bear, and then thought he would think that was hysterical.

"Come on," Gwen said. "We have flyers to pick up. And…a year might be a little presumptuous."

He scrambled through his thoughts as he followed her out of the hotel, trying to remember what he'd said before the bear interrupted, and then hope flew through him. "Next weekend, then? Whether you want to play at the pub or not?"

"Yeah," she said with an almost shy smile. "I'd like to spend some time with you when we're not running around trying to make a gig happen."

"It's a date," Bill promised fervently. If he didn't have to explain everything this weekend, he was sure he could figure it out. "Although I can't believe you want to spend any time with me at all after being introduced to half my family."

"Oh, no." Gwen's eyes were bright. "No, they're honestly great, Bill. I told you what my family was like. So many of you getting along so well? It's wonderful. And I like your cousin Ashley. She plays hardball."

Bill laughed as they left the hotel. "Yeah, she does. She used to keep the younger cousins in line. Still does, I guess. She's about ten years younger than me, but I think Laurie and Jon actually live in fear of her."

"As well they should." They did an awkward little dance at her car that ended in Gwen dangling the keys at him. "It's chivalrous and everything for you to want to open the door for me, but I've got the keys, so get out of the way." He did, sheepishly, and Gwen opened her door and crawled in to open his from the inside, calling, "Oooh, it still smells like cinnamon. That's my new favorite scent. Okay, where's this print shop?"

"On Second and Main," Bill said as blandly as he could after he'd gotten in the car. Gwen gave him a hard stare and he laughed. "Oh, you meant how do we get there? Left out of the parking lot, right after three blocks, I'll navigate more from there."

"Hnf. Thank you, Mr Bad Jokes Man."

Bill sketched a bow. "You're welcome. It's not far. Nothing's far, in Renaissance."

"I like it. And the setting couldn't be more perfect." Gwen nodded toward the mountains that soared up more or less a stone's throw away. "I assume this is a real skiing hotspot?"

"Summer tourism is the Ren Faire, winter tourism is skiing." Bill pointed out their next turn. "I don't do either."

Gwen laughed. "No? No skiing? Why not?"

The real answer was that in his heart, Bill was certain if he had a fall, he would instinctively shift into a bear, which was better at rolling through snow than he was. That didn't seem like an answer he could offer right now, so he said, "Two hundred and forty pounds of me hurtling downhill at high speed has always seemed like a bad idea," which was also true.

"I've never been either. We can go try the, what do they call it? Bunny hills? Do they really call them that? Sometime."

"I don't know if they really call them that, but what if I counter-proposed just going up to the resorts and watching the skiers from the nice safe warmth of the ski lodges while drinking hot chocolate?"

"Hmph. Where's your sense of adventure?"

"I'm not sure I have one," Bill admitted. "Turn right here, and we're there."

"Oh, that was fast. I bet they're not ready yet." Gwen swung out of the car and looked the little strip mall up and down. "This is totally Anywhere, USA, isn't it? I like it, though. And all the storefronts are full. It seems like Renaissance is kind of thriving."

"It's a—" Bill broke off, abruptly at a loss. Renaissance was a shifter town, which meant shifters from all walks of life had settled there, knowing they had a relatively safe community, a lot of wilderness next door, and a good reason to keep the town bustling and alive. But he couldn't say that without explaining shifters, and while there was a scruffy patch of trees over to the left of the strip mall, he didn't think it was quite private enough to change into a 1200 pound grizzly bear in. He ended up saying, "—a good little town," awkwardly, although Gwen didn't seem to notice the awkwardness.

"I've never lived anywhere this small. Not for long, anyway. We lived in Seattle when I was little, and then it was Los Angeles until everything went to hell. It took me a while to settle in Denver but I didn't really live anywhere between then." At Bill's questioning look, Gwen shrugged. "I did do the van life for a while. I didn't want to stay anywhere that people might recognize me, so I basically avoided them entirely for a couple of years and just drove all over the place. Did some street busking to make money, or picked up odd jobs in towns I was going through. I was terrible at everything except, like, raking leaves. Eventually I'd, you know, gotten enough older, lost enough baby face, that I didn't look as much like myself, and I got a secret weapon to disguise myself."

"A secret weapon…?"

She whipped out a pair of glasses from a pocket and put them on with great flair. They were thick-framed cat-eyes with sparkles, and did something to the color of her eyes. "Wow," Bill said after a moment of studying her. "Those really don't suit you at all."

Gwen laughed, clearly delighted. "They really don't, do they? But they're incredibly distracting."

"Are the lenses tinted? Your eyes look almost green."

"Yup. Just a little yellow in them. No rose-colored glasses for me. Also they get darker outside—" They did as she was talking, a polarizing effect taking place. "—so it's extra-disguisey, or something. It's less of an issue now," she added, taking the glasses off. "But it helped a lot when I was in my early twenties. Psychologically, at least."

"I imagine so. That must have been difficult." It felt like a completely inadequate thing to say, but Gwen's smile turned soft and grateful.

"It was bad the first few years. I like being Gwen Booker, though, once I got used to it. She's got a lot more freedom than Emma Hart ever would have had. She also has a gig to sell out, so why don't we go see if those flyers are ready, and tell everybody there's a party tonight?"

"Yes, ma'am." Bill saluted. They went in to collect the flyers, and came out again trying desperately not to laugh at how Ripley had played it totally cool, like, yeah, they knew Gwen Booker, hey Gwen, nice to see you, in front of their coworkers, only for bone-piercing shrieks and giggles to break just before the door closed behind Bill and Gwen again. "Are you sure you're not top of the charts?" Bill demanded as they got back in the car. "You seem awfully popular!"

"If I had a major label behind me for the next album I'd go stratospheric," Gwen said with charming frankness. "That might sound arrogant, but the band's put the work in over the past decade. The thing— a thing—is that labels don't want workhorses. They want you to be a hit with the first album these days, instead of building an audience over two or three albums and breaking out. We've built the audience. If things were a little different, we'd break out."

"Do you want to? If we go over a couple blocks we'll be downtown and can put flyers up there. This area doesn't get as much foot traffic."

"Okay." Gwen drove them over, her expression thoughtful, but she didn't answer the question until they were out of the car in the cool autumn morning and hanging up posters. "If I personally get any more famous than I am, everybody's going to remember Emma Hart, and that's not my fave, no. I mean, a lot of my fans already know, but they've, like, let it go? But it'd become the story about the band. On the other hand…" She shrugged as they walked around, sticking posters to light poles and going into businesses to ask if they could put them up there. "The band has put in the work. I'd love to see them get the recognition they deserve. Even though they'd also get overshadowed by who I used to be."

"I take it they all know?"

"Yeah. But knowing, and being in the middle of a media shitstorm about it, are not the same things. Trust me," she said wryly. " I know."

"I bet you do. Is this what you do?" He nodded toward the flyers they'd just posted. "I mean, is it how you built your audience?"

"Some of it. Penny, she's my drummer, she's amazing at social media. I stay away from it, obviously, but Penny's out there with the videos and the clips and the quips, and because I'm only like a background character in them in a lot of ways, the rest of them have gotten a chance to shine. I've lost most of the band to bigger names over the years, because of her promo, but we've found great new people the same way. And she's stuck with me. She says she wants to be the one who was there all along when Sixty Pix breaks big."

"What's with the name? 'Sixty Pix?'"

Gwen grinned, a big bright flash of teeth. "That's actually Penny, too. Well, it's us, but she was looking for a good hashtag to promote her stage photography and landed on this idea of posting sixty pictures a week, ten a day except on Mondays. Her tag was 'Sixty Pics,' P-I-C-S instead of P-I-X, but when the band started to actually take shape we thought we could use that, so for a while it was Sixty Pics of Sixty Pix, and at some point she dropped the P-I-C-S spelling and here we are. My drummer, the marketing whiz kid."

"She sounds great. It'll be nice to meet her."

"Speaking of which." Gwen took her phone out to check the time, then waggled it at him. "We should grab a snack and go back to the pub. The band will be there soon."