He also, she realized, had an expression of increasing dismay stretching the lines of his face longer and longer as he looked her up and down. "G…Gwendolyn Brooker?" The way he said it told Gwen he knew that wasn't right, but that he was desperately hoping he was somehow wrong.
Gwen kind of rolled her eyes, glancing around the room to see if anybody else was there, and offered him a crooked smile in return. "Uh, no? Gwen. GwenBooker."
All the hope drained out of the big man's face. He let go of her hand, put his face in both of his, and moaned, "Ohno," into his palms.
Gwen froze, feeling suddenly a bit like a mouse that had alarmed an elephant. "Wh…aaaaat did I do?"
"Oh, no," he said, still into his palms, "no, it was me. Or someone on my staff, but…me. I'm the buck. It stops here. Oh, God, we're doomed."
"That," Gwen said, cautiously, "seems insulting."
Bill Torben—sheassumedthis giant of a man was Bill Torben, anyway—jerked his gaze up from his palms with an expression of overwhelming guilt. "Oh, God, no, not you, I mean, yes, you, you're adisaster, but no, notyou."
Gwen did the look-around-the-room thing again, moving just her eyes until she was pretty certain there wasn't anyone else in there. It was a six by ten room, give or take, dominated—well,dominatedby the very large man in it, but in furniture terms, dominated by a desk and a wall of filing cabinets thatseemed very retro but she felt in her soul were probably incredibly organized. There was a painting she'd only glimpsed on the opposite wall. She had the impression it was of a grizzly bear. A window with closed curtains was behind the desk, which was a shame, because it made the room seem smaller and darker than it needed to be, but on the other hand, if the curtains were open, the sun would glare on his computer monitor.
There was not, unless they were hidden under the desk, anyone else in the room. Once Gwen was satisfied of that, she looked back up at the distraught pub owner. "Still pretty sure I'm insulted."
"I hiredGwendolyn Brooker," Bill groaned. "Ajazz musician.Or at least, I meant to. I don't know what went wrong, oh,God." He left Gwen standing in the middle of the room and went back to his desk, shuffling through neatly-arranged paperwork. Gwen stared at him a moment, then several moments, and when it became clear he was going to be busy for some time, shrugged her guitar off her shoulder, leaned it against the filing cabinets, and sat in one of the two chairs onthisside of the desk, meant for visitors.
After a couple of seconds she made a face, got up, and tried the other chair. It wasn't any more comfortable than the first one had been. "You don't get a lot of people in here, do you?"
"What? No. What?" Bill looked up from the paperwork, his eyebrows—thick, like the rest of him, and darker blonde than his hair—beetled down. "What?"
"These are incredibly uncomfortable chairs," Gwen said with a degree of patient amusement. "Both of them. Like, exceptionally uncomfortable. Nobody sits in them, do they?"
"No, not—not really, no. We actually do most of our business out front, this is just, I thought Ms. Brooker would be more comforta…are they really that bad?"
Gwen's eyebrows lifted. "Have you never sat in one?"
Bill made a vague gesture at himself. At his backside, specifically. Gwen tilted sideways a few inches as if that would remove the desk and allow her to see said backside. "My big ass doesn't fit in most chairs, so I assumed they were more comfortable for other people."
Gwen had only had a brief look at the ass in question, as he'd gone back around the desk. To her mind, it had filled out his jeansextremelynicely. "Flying must be no fun for you, then."
"Oh, I don't fly. Bears walk. Uh." A look of horror came over his face and he shook himself. "Uh, I mean, drive? We…I have a commercial license, I drive the delivery trucks sometimes. Whoareyou?" The last words came out plaintively, like he was painfully aware of having messed everything, including this conversation, up. "I mean, Gwen Booker, I got that, but…"
"I'm a rock musician," Gwen said, taking pity on him. "I don't know Gwendolyn Brooker at all, and I don't know a note of jazz music. I'm sorry, dude."
"Bill," he said absently, and then horror crossed his face again. "I didn't even introduce myself, did I? Bill. Bill Torben."
"I figured," Gwen said dryly. "Nice to meet you, Bill. You're very tall. I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say."
To her relief, he laughed. A warm, deep laugh that wasn't very loud, but rumbled right across her skin and raised excited goosebumps. "I am tall," he agreed. "Biggest of my brothers, although Steve gives me a run for my money. You're very small."
Gwen laughed. "I'm not. Not really. But from your height probably everybody shorter than a linebacker looks small."
He scratched the side of his jaw, then kept scratching, like his beard itched now that he'd noticed it. "I was a linebacker in high school," he admitted. "You?"
"Funnily enough, I didn't play any football in high school. There was a girl at my school who did, through," Gwenremembered suddenly. "She was hot. Played quarterback. Fast. Great hands. Apparently. I never found out, myself."
To her astonishment, a blush shot up Bill Torben's face, starting from somewhere beneath his t-shirt collar, curdling his neck and then his cheekbones and forehead a deep red that she would have bought as a lipstick shade. Gwen's lips parted in astonishment, and, as his blush held on, turned to a grin. "So now you've met Gwen Booker, rock star and prone to saying inappropriate things at job interviews. Although I guess this isn't really an interview, since I've already been hired."
"We don'tdorock at Oktoberfest," Bill said desperately. "I don't know how this happened, and I'm sorry, it's not your fault, but we're going to lose our whole audience because of you."
CHAPTER 3
Those were not the words Bill wanted to hear himself say to Gwen Booker. Hewantedto hear himself sayyou'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 itlovedhugs. Really trulylovedthem. 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 hugit, in its huge, furry, claw-y, dangerous natural form.
