Page 14 of Partridge in a Bear Tree

"By hailing strong men to do heavy lifting instead of me doing it, so I approve." Penny leaned against the van with her. "We've played so many crazy venues over the past ten years or so that we've just gotten really, really good at reacting on the fly, I think. Things are always going wrong and it's great if there's a team in place to fix it, but it's not like we've been selling out stadium tours."

"Yet," Ashley said warmly.

To her surprise, Penny felt her face heat up. She hunched her shoulders and smiled at the cold ground. "Yet. I hope. But the point is a big professional venue is going to have a sound team, a tech team, in place to make everything work smoothly. We haven't had that kind of support, so we've gotten really good at figuring it out and making it happen on our own. If we start getting real support we'll probably lose our minds and be horrible divas who shout at people for doing the work around us wrong because we're so used to doing it ourselves."

"I doubt that. It's probably more likely you'll get in the way because you want to help and you'll be so nice about it people will feel bad about telling you no."

Penny pursed her lips. "That actually sounds really likely, yeah. I guess we'll just have to get so big and famous we can't possibly be available to help because we'll get mugged if we're out laying speaker wires or something."

Ashley laughed and tried twice to find a response to that before she could really talk. "On one hand, that sounds great for you, but on the other, people wanting to mug you is bad!"

"Maybe I'll employ a tall Amazonian bodyguard. It's working pretty well for Gwen."

"Bill isn't Amazonian," Ashley pointed out with amusement.

"No, he's…well, whatever the male equivalent of Amazonian is, but you know what I mean. Howareyou doing with all the chaos?" Penny asked again. Ashley's cousins were collecting at the other side of the parking lot, with Laurie, whose hair was still in the intricate braids, now gesturing and giving orders. The group of large men finally nodded and headed toward the van, so Penny stood up, and Ashley moved away with her.

"I'm less freaked out than I was last night," Ashley admitted. "You're pretty reassuring, and having these tents available makes all the difference."

"Me. Reassuring." Penny laughed. "I think large solid presences are reassuring. I probably qualify as solid, but not large. Here, guys." She went forward again to explain how the tents went together, not because it was difficult, but because it was faster to show them than to let them figure it out. Within a few minutes, there were half-erected tent poles with fabric vinyl walls—or something, Penny didn't actually know what the tent material itself was—flopping between them.

"We got this," Laurie announced to Ashley. "We'll get them set up and I'll come in to find you and get your okay on the layout and everything, okay?"

"You should get my okay on the layout before you have it set up, or you might have to move everything," Ashley protested.

Penny put her hand on Ashley's arm. "There are an incredibly limited number of ways they can put them up, so they're not going to have to move anything. In the meantime, it's eleven in the morning and I, for one, haven't eaten anything except a bad cup of coffee and a worse doughnut from a gas station just outside of Denver. So unless you're actually supposed to be at work right now, I think instead of worrying about how they lay the whole thing out, you should probably take me over to that diner down the street and feed me."

Ashley blinked at her. "I haven't eaten either…"

"I didn't think so." Penny, feeling smug at guessing right, slid her arm through Ashley's. "So. Breakfast, and then we'll come back and admire all the heavy lifting your big strong handsome cousins have done."

Ashley, bemused, said, "Okay," and Penny led her off toward the diner.

CHAPTER 9

Ashley was beginning to think Penny got her own way a lot. Otherwise she, Ashley, would not be walking Penny to the diner. Instead she would be standing around the parking lot worrying and fussing and, she reluctantly concluded, possibly, justpossibly, being in the way. They were at a table and warming up in the cozy diner before she said, "How did you do that?" in a tone that sounded mystified even to her own ears.

Penny set the menu aside and grinned across the table at her. "I think you have a lot in common with your cousin Bill. Very responsible, maybe a little uptight about making sure things get done because you don't quite trust anybody else to do it, probably with good reason. But not everything needs your immediate and constant supervision. I speak from the experience of having learned this the hard way myself. So I appealed?—"

Despite herself, Ashley laughed. "To my better nature?"

"Oh, God, no. 'Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.' Although I'm constantly amazed at how many people actually vote against their own self-interests, but never mind that. That's a long way of saying I figured you were hungry and thatsuggesting food would outweigh your sense of responsibility for keeping an eye on a bunch of grown men who have been given the equivalent of a giant Lego set to put together."

"You're just very confident, aren't you?" Ashley sat back in the booth, staring at Penny in admiration. The Sixty Pix drummer was small and compact, but then, Ashley thought, so were firecrackers, and they made a hell of a sound. "Was that a quote, the thing about better natures? It sounded like one."

"Yeah, an old science fiction writer said it. Robert Heinlein. And look, yeah, I hit things really hard for a living—well, not a living, but for a hobby—well, not a hobby, I do get paid for it—anyway, the point is, I'm reallyshortand the best way to get people to take me seriously is to not only be brazenly confident about everything, but alsorightabout everything, like, all the time."

Ashley gave a startled laugh. "And are you?"

Penny offered a positively rakish grin. "Often enough, yeah. Besides, we're both going to be increasingly busy as today goes on, I think, so if we're doing the flirting thing I thought I should get you alone to do that for a little while. So tell me about Ashley Torben."

The rakish grin made Ashley's heart flutter, but the much softer smile that followed Penny's last few words made her insides positively melt. "You've got a very direct way of flirting."

"It's Gwen's fault. I learned from her. Is it working?"

Part of Ashley wanted to explain it wouldn't matter if Penny didn't flirt at all. That Ashley would happily follow her around adoringly just to get the time of day, never mind a series of devastating smiles and direct, laughing comments. That she knew in her soul that the confident redheaded drummer was everything that would make her happy in life.

Of course, all that also required her explaining that she could turn into a bear and that her certainty that they belongedtogether was born out of a magic that had served shifters well over the millennia. That didn't seem like the right conversation to have in a diner, so Ashley only ducked her head and murmured, "Yeah, I think it is."

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