***
Gus handed Nick a glass of beer before he could ask for one. His hand automatically curved around the icy surface, chilling his palm. His mouth tasted the bitter foam before it had even passed his lips.
Who the hell was that woman? Why did locking gazes with her make him feel as if someone had plunged a stiletto right through his heart? Clean and painless, yet it left him dead. Or reborn. Transformed, in any case.
She wasn’t beautiful…except that she was. Long, tawny hair fell in gentle waves around a narrow, angular face. Her eyes were too large, too round, and even in the bar’s dim light, even with a good thirty feet separating her from him, he could see that they were hazel. Damn, he could see her eyelashes.
He could also see the guy with her. And the diamond solitaire, as big as the frickin’ Rock of Gibraltar, glinting on her left ring finger.
Given the size of that ring, Nick felt safe in assuming that, one, she was engaged, and two, Nick—a man who never would, or could, give a woman a ring like that—wasn’t her type. The guy with her was clean cut and dressed in clothes that reeked wealth. Her outfit pegged her as upper-class, too: tailored trousers, a soft, pale sweater beneath a tweedy-looking jacket, a colorful silk-looking scarf coiled around her neck.
The folks Nick hung out with wore faded wool scarves their mothers or wives or girlfriends had knitted for them four Christmases ago. But then, the folks Nick hung out with didn’t dress like they’d just stepped off a sixty-foot yacht. If they’d stepped off a boat, it was a trawler, and they wore waders and smelled of fish.
He’d wager a year’s salary that the woman whose too-big eyes had sent that stiletto straight through him from all the way across the room didn’t smell like fish.
“It’s the song,” Gus said.
Nick snorted. “Don’t start in.”
Gus chuckled and poured some vodka into a martini glass. It flowed in a smooth, clear thread from the spout plugged into the top of the bottle. Gus never had to measure. She knew the exact amount of every ingredient in every drink. “I’m not starting in,” she said. “Just saying.”
Nick swiveled around to face the bar, to stare at Gus rather than the woman with the blinding engagement ring adorning her left hand. The only jewelry Gus wore was a loop of braided leather around her wrist. She was tall and athletic in build, her red hair fading to gray and chopped in short tufts that looked almost, but not quite, masculine . She’d been running the bar since Nick was in diapers, and it felt somehow disrespectful to argue with her. But all those legends about the jukebox, the weird songs that came out of it, the weirder effect they had on people…
Nick didn’t believe that shit. Real life had laid too many scars on him. The only things he believed in were hard work, good sex and paying for your mistakes. And an occasional cold beer.
Not magic. And certainly not jukeboxes.
Changes Page 2
