Page 17 of Demon Loved (The Witches of Mingus Mountain #5)

Just breathe, she told herself, deciding one top would be too warm and another too casual.

Maybe a dress?

She released a huff of annoyance and went back into the dining room, where her half-drunk cup of coffee sat waiting for her on the table. A few sips didn’t seem to help very much, but she swallowed some more anyway.

Green tea might have made her less jangly, but there wasn’t much she could do about that now.

All right, maybe she should double-check the weather reports.

A glance at her phone told her it was going to be eighty-five degrees and sunny today. Certainly warm enough for a tank top and sandals and one of the pretty sequined peasant skirts she’d bought at a boutique in Sedona when they were having an end-of-summer sale last year.

But would the sequins catch the sunlight too much and possibly annoy some of the members of her audience with their dancing reflections?

Okay, now you’re really overthinking things, she scolded herself. Stop screwing around.

Bellamy had said once that Bree tended to go back and forth whenever making a decision because she was a Libra, someone who needed to weigh all the possible angles when faced with a choice.

While Brianna still wasn’t sure how much stock she should place in astrology, she’d been forced to admit that her friend had a point there.

One last swallow of coffee, and then she marched back into the bedroom, resolutely pulled out the skirt she’d been thinking of, one that swirled with tie dye in shades of turquoise and soft green and deeper blue, along with a green tank top she’d bought a while back because it was the perfect pale mint color to go with the skirt.

Some silvery flip-flops and turquoise jewelry, and she figured she had herself a pretty decent performance outfit.

And date ensemble. She honestly had no idea how the day was even going to go — would she and Bill realize they were good together in small doses, but an entire afternoon was a bridge too far?

— and yet she also realized it was way too late to do anything except proceed as planned.

It wasn’t as if she could pull out of the folk festival at this late date, and it also wasn’t as if she could cancel things with Bill, either.

Okay, she probably could do that if she really wanted to, although any excuse she tried to manufacture sounded impossibly weak in her mind.

Also, she really did want to see him. She’d thought that maybe a day away from him would have given her some perspective, would have allowed her to concede that, sure, he was a nice guy, but nothing terribly special.

Except that assessment would have been dead wrong.

The more she was out and around other people, the more she realized how truly unique he was.

A man who looked like a male model but didn’t seem to notice how handsome he was?

A guy who would drop everything to help her install a painting at a total stranger’s house?

Men like that didn’t come along very often.

Actually, they hadn’t come along at all…well, not until Bill Garrett arrived in Jerome. Even if they didn’t have any kind of a future together, Brianna knew she’d be stupid not to spend every moment with him that she possibly could until it was time for him to go back to L.A.

Now that she’d firmed up that particular reality in her mind, she felt better about getting in the shower and performing the rest of her preparations that morning.

Most of the time, she didn’t wear a lot of makeup, just some mascara and a bit of lip stain or gloss, but because she would be performing, she knew she needed to put in more effort than that.

Foundation with sunscreen, since she’d be outside most of the day, and blush and eyeshadow and a hint of liner to go with her usual mascara.

Lip stain rather than gloss, though, because whatever she put on needed to last as long as possible.

At least she’d finally found her way through the bridge of the song that had been giving her so much trouble.

She could have replaced the piece with something else, she supposed, but she’d wanted to perform it today, and an hour of practicing and polishing after she’d gotten home from her gig the night before had told her the song was as ready as it would ever be.

Well, she hoped it was, anyway.

Eleven o’clock. Her hair was still a little damp — she tended to let it air-dry when the weather was warm enough and allow its natural wave to take hold — but that was all right. It would be completely dry by the time she met Bill.

The folk festival was being held at the lower park, located down on Hull Street.

If they wanted to, musicians could check in early and leave their instruments and other equipment to be looked after by some of the festival’s volunteers, and that was exactly what Bree planned to do.

That way, she’d have minimal setup when it finally came time for her to perform at four o’clock.

Although the park was only a block away from her apartment, she still loaded everything in Sally and drove it over, since trying to lug two guitars, her mic and mic stand, and an amp over there all by herself would have been a little too difficult.

When she got to the park, she saw that Angela and Connor were helping with the check-in.

From what Brianna had heard, a lot of primas and their consorts weren’t nearly so hands-on, but the couple had always let their instincts guide them rather than be ruled by so-called expectations for clan heads.

“Hey,” Connor said as she approached, a guitar slung over each shoulder. “What else do you need help with?”

“My amp and my mic equipment,” Bree replied, not surprised that she hadn’t even needed to ask for assistance but that Connor had immediately volunteered. It was just the way both of them were.

“On it,” he said cheerfully.

Angela had been standing at a table, checking in one of the musicians, but it seemed she must have been almost finished because she stepped away almost immediately. “Hi, Bree,” she said, also sounding utterly upbeat.

Well, why shouldn’t she? Maybe she’d been through some pretty rough stuff in the past, but it had been smooth sailing for her and Connor for the past twenty-five years.

The two of them weren’t dissimilar in coloring, both with dark hair and green-hued eyes, although Angela’s were a brilliant emerald that looked almost like contact lenses, while Connor’s were a lot darker, more like nephrite jade.

They both also seemed much younger than the fifty-plus they actually were, but Bree guessed that decades of happiness could do that for a person.

Even though she knew she shouldn’t have allowed the thought to enter her mind, it crept in there anyway.

What would it be like to share that many years with Bill Garrett?

She shooed the notion away as best she could. Even if everything else about him had been perfect — namely, that he’d turned out to be a warlock from Arizona rather than a civilian whose home base was in L.A. — she knew it was way too early to be thinking about him like that.

Except that witches and warlocks sometimes did know this early in a relationship when someone was the exact right fit in every possible way.

“Do you want me to take those?” Angela continued, tilting her head toward the guitars Bree had slung over each shoulder.

“Oh, right,” she replied. Hopefully, the prima hadn’t noticed the way she’d been lost in the clouds.

Probably she had, though. Angela might act casual and laid-back, but she didn’t miss a trick.

Since Brianna knew that trying to comment on her absentmindedness would only make things worse, she slipped off first her six-string and then the steel twelve-string and handed them over.

The prima picked up a couple of tags that had been sitting on the table behind her, then tied one on each guitar so it would be obvious which ones were hers.

Connor came over right then with the mic and the amp — the festival was supplying the mic stands — and Angela also tied tags on those.

“How many people are you expecting to attend?” Bree asked, figuring she should try to make some conversation.

Besides, she hadn’t gotten a final tally from the festival organizers, a couple of civilians who ran the Main Stage club down in Cottonwood, and it would be nice to know what kind of crowd was going to show up.

“The latest number we got was around two hundred,” Angela said. “But there are always people who show up at the last minute and want to buy tickets at the gate, so we’ll probably get about fifty more.”

“And then we’ll be at capacity,” Connor chimed in. “The park won’t hold any more than that.”

No, it definitely wouldn’t. Lower Park — maybe it had had a real name once upon a time, but Bree had never heard it referred to as anything except that — ran alongside Hull Avenue for fifty yards or so and was often used for art shows and other musical events, but there was a limit to how many people could gather there.

Then again, Jerome was so small that you’d probably be able to hear the music no matter where you were.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about that; true, she was no stranger to performing, but having maybe twenty or thirty people listening to you at a wine tasting room was a far cry from having the entire population of Jerome become your audience.

Well, the time to worry about that was long past. Right now, she just needed to focus on giving the best performance possible.

“That’s great,” she said brightly. “I’m glad the event is doing so well.”

“Yes, it’s grown a little each year,” Angela replied. “We can’t get any bigger than this, though.”

No, they couldn’t. There were bigger venues down in Cottonwood — or even in tiny Clarkdale, which at least had a nice big park near downtown, a park with its own gazebo, but that would sort of defeat the point of having a Jerome folk festival.