The waitress was back sooner than Diana expected; the service was quicker here than at the Ocean Bluff Inn. She set three square napkins on the table, then placed a mug peaked with whipped cream like a snow-capped mountain in front of Diana, and a beer in a sweating bottle and a V-shaped glass in front of Peter. His glass had tiny flecks of ice on the rim but it appeared clean. Diana wondered whether he would pour his drink into the glass or drink it straight from the bottle. Drinking from the bottle would protect his tender digestive system from whatever imaginary contamination the glass might contain, but it was so déclassé.
Her mug looked clean enough. She took a sip—hot coffee, cool whipped cream and soothing whisky, a blend of bitter and sweet that simmered down her throat. It was, in fact, the most delicious Irish coffee she’d ever tasted. She smiled at Peter, but he was too busy frowning at the beer bottle and glass to notice.
The song ended, and the crowd at the center of the tavern thinned as the dancers drifted back to their seats. Diana followed a couple with her gaze as they walked arm-in-arm toward the bar. The woman was plump, the man husky, and both were clad in plaid flannel and blue denim. She couldn’t see their faces, yet from their posture alone, the way the woman’s arm snuggled around the man’s waist, his arm looped over her shoulders, and her head leaned gently into the hollow of his neck, Diana could tell they were in love. She allowed herself an envious sigh, then wondered why she envied them. She and Peter were in love, too, weren’t they?
When the couple reached the bar, a man stepped out of their way. Tall and lean, he had on black jeans, a Henley shirt and a denim work shirt over it, his sleeves rolled up to expose strong forearms. His face was an intriguing arrangement of planes and hollows, shadows and light. He had a hard chin, a long nose—definitely not a pretty nose—and dark, dark eyes. His hair was dark, as well, thick and wavy and in desperate need of a comb.
His eyes met hers just as the third song began to emerge from the jukebox. It was an old song, from before her time, but she recognized it anyway. Her Uncle Martin loved British rock from the Sixties and Seventies, and when Diana’s family visited him on Martha’s Vineyard, he’d serenade her with his favorite songs. This one was David Bowie. Changes.
The man with the dark hair and the darker eyes was staring at her. She stared back, unsure why. Unsure why she couldn’t seem to look away from him. Unsure why he was gazing at her with such intensity.
The song’s familiar, stammering refrain filled the air: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
Every other sound fell away. She heard no other voices. No clinks of glasses touching, no thuds of bottles being set on tables, no scrape of chair legs against the wooden floor. She heard nothing but the song—and she saw no one but the man.
“Diana!” An instant after the last soulful wail of a saxophone at the end of the song faded away, Peter’s voice intruded, forceful and demanding. “Diana!”
She flinched and swung around in her chair, as if by ending, the song had released her from a spell. Peter was studying her, his brows dipped into a deep frown. “Where the hell were you?”
“Right here.” Her voice sounded odd to her. She took a hot sip of her Irish coffee, as if that would wash away the fog in her throat, in her brain.
“Finish your drink.” He waved impatiently at her mug. “I want to leave.”
You’ve wanted to leave since the moment we arrived, she thought with a strange blend of irritation and…fear. Fear that something inside her was wrong, something had become unhinged. Something was falling apart.
Had the bartender added a dangerous extra ingredient to her drink?
“All right,” she said, nudging the mug away from her. “Let’s go.”
But even after she’d stood, donned her jacket and let Peter lead her out of the tavern, she knew she’d left a piece of her soul behind.
***
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.
***
Chapter Two
Nick’s Monday morning routine was to rise around six and head over to the Community Center to work out in the gym. Free membership was a perk of his job, and during his time in detention, he’d discovered that vigorous physical exercise kept his brain functioning as well as his body. After his workout, he’d shower and walk down the street to Riley’s for breakfast. Rita, his favorite waitress there, always topped off his travel mug with coffee before he left.
From Riley’s, he’d stroll down to the concrete and stone sea wall constructed along the edge of the beach, designed to keep the ocean’s waves from sweeping across Atlantic Avenue, damaging the cars and buildings and leaving behind a residue of sand, shells, and seaweed. The abutment had served its purpose for more than fifty years, failing only a few times when huge nor’easters had roared up the New England coast.
Nick liked standing by the retaining wall, leaning his arms on the thick concrete ledge and surveying the beach below. Beyond it stretched the eastern horizon, a seam separating the blue-gray Atlantic from the dawn-pink sky. It didn’t surprise him that ancient navigators, gazing west from the shores of Europe, believed the earth was flat. How could it not be, when the horizon was so straight?
They were wrong, of course
.
The folks who believed the Faulk Street Tavern’s jukebox had some sort of supernatural power were wrong, too.
Just because that damned David Bowie song was still humming through his head, a two-day ear worm that refused to wiggle its way out of his skull, didn’t mean anything except that the music he’d listened to all day yesterday—head-banging heavy metal, whiny C&W tunes about runaway dogs and bitchy women, or maybe runaway women and bitchy dogs, and finally a ninety-minute megadose of Pearl Jam—had failed to eradicate the Bowie song from Nick’s brain. He didn’t even like the song. All that stammering. The melodramatic melody. The sobbing quality of Bowie’s voice. Nick had vague memories of his parents listening to David Bowie years ago, and memories of his parents were something he’d just as soon avoid.
The coffee from Riley’s was helping, though. The coffee and the blustery March wind gusting off the water were doing more to clear that god-awful tune from his head than all the music he’d blasted yesterday. Above the water, a pair of gulls flew circles around each other in an airborne dance. Beyond the jetty to the south, the silhouette of a fishing boat, cables and masts vivid against the pale morning sky, headed out toward that flat horizon. “Don’t fall over the edge,” Nick murmured, as if the boat could hear him. As if there was an edge to fall over.
In the distance to his north, he spotted a jogger running along the beach, heading toward where he stood. As the figure drew nearer, he could see she was a woman, gliding across the sand at the high-tide line. Running on dry sand could strain a person’s ankles and calves, but along the tide line the sand was damp and solid, supporting a jogger’s footfalls. Still, the wind was stiff and the air chilly, so the jogger had her challenges. She wore black running pants that clung to her long, slim legs, and a radioactive-orange jacket. She’d be visible in that thing even if she ran at midnight. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
Tawny hair, sunlight turning the strands gold. A sharp, angular face. Way-too-big hazel eyes.
Once again, he couldn’t look away. There was no jukebox out here, no David Bowie song, so he knew none of Gus’s idiotic superstitions were at play. Yet he was transfixed by the woman as she jogged closer. Captivated. Unable to keep from staring at her.
His gaze tracked her as she sprinted past him, running parallel to the retaining wall. Street level was about five feet above the beach, so she’d have to look up to see him. But her face remained forward, her eyes aimed at the sand ahead of her as if she could visualize an actual path instead of just a stretch of beach.
She continued south toward the jetty, and he decided she looked almost as good from the rear as from the front. Those stretchy black running pants did wonders for her ass.
The sun caught the diamond on her left hand.
So she was taken. He understood that. No law said a guy couldn’t look. And admire. And maybe enjoy a pleasant if frustrating twinge of lust.
Even if she weren’t wearing an engagement ring, he’d never have anything to do with her. She wasn’t his type. Too patrician. He could tell she was from a different universe, not just by her obviously expensive jewelry but by her bearing, her polish, the way she could jog the length of the beach without popping a bead of sweat. Sure, the air was cold, but Nick could work out in an industrial freezer and still wind up drenched in perspiration. Rich people had more refined sweat glands, he figured.
She had to be a tourist. He knew most of Brogan’s Point’s residents, even the wealthy ones who lived in the sprawling mansions on the north side of town, past the Ocean Bluff Inn. Those rich folks were the people he often hit up for donations to subsidize the youth programs he ran. He’d give talks, write proposals, sit through excruciating teas and cocktail parties where funds were being raised. He didn’t hate affluent people, or even resent them. He did his best not to gag on the Prosecco or the sherry they served, and he tried not to make a mess with the finger sandwiches, which never seemed to be the right size for his fingers. He was grateful to those rich citizens. But he knew they weren’t his people.
The beautiful jogger wasn’t his people, either. She was just a wealthy woman passing through town, one of those iconoclasts who vacationed in Brogan’s Point during the off season. Maybe she preferred beaches when they weren’t mobbed with riffraff—the public beaches here in town were usually jam-packed from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Or maybe she spent those prime summer beach months someplace nicer—Nantucket, or Kennebunkport. Or the Riviera.
She reached the jetty and halted, hands on hips. He could see the rise and fall of her shoulders as she panted. After a minute, she lifted one hand to her head and pushed back her hair. Then she turned.
And saw him.
The only music he heard was the caws and mews of the sea gulls swooping down toward the jetty, no doubt looking for some unlucky clams to smash against the rocks and devour. But just like two nights ago at the Faulk Street Tavern, the woman stared at him and he felt…punched in the gut today. Not stabbed, punched.
He took a sip of coffee to keep from doubling over and grunting like someone on the wrong end of a fist. The coffee was still blessedly hot. Thank God for insulated travel mugs.
Her gaze pinning him like a laser sight on a rifle, she sauntered up the beach’s slope to the retaining wall. Her feet sank into the powdery white sand above the high tide line, but that didn’t slow her down. He saw now why she’d tried to smooth her hair. Multiple strands had escaped from the elastic, and the wind off the water had tangled them into a silky mess.
She halted just a few feet below where he stood. He contemplated leaping down from the retaining wall to join her on the beach. But then he’d have to walk all the way to the jetty to get back up to the street. It would be easier to reach down and haul her up the wall. She was so slim, she couldn’t weigh much.
“That coffee smells amazing,” she said.
Definitely not what he’d been expecting her to say. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but he was surprised she could smell the coffee from a distance, with the travel mug’s lid screwed on tight and the briny fragrance of the ocean heavy in the air. “It is amazing,” he said.
“Where did you get it?”
“Riley’s, just up the street. Best coffee in Brogan’s Point. Maybe in the world.” Why were they talking about coffee? Then again, why not? Discussing coffee with her seemed natural, easy, like something they might do every morning. “I’ll buy you a cup,” he said.
“Oh, I…” She gazed around, then patted the zippered pockets of her glow-in-the-dark jacket. A faint laugh escaped her. “I don’t have any money with me.”
“You don’t need money. I just said I’ll buy you a cup.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
His gaze snagged on the huge diamond sparkling on her left ring finger. Then he shrugged. “Riley’s coffee is always a good idea. Give me your hands.” He set his mug down on the sidewalk adjacent to the retaining wall, then braced himself and reached down to her.
She eyed the wall dubiously, and then his hands. Her shoulders rose and fell again, another deep breath, and she lifted her arms.
He was right; she didn’t weigh that much. She bent her legs and used the treaded soles of her running shoes against the stones, half walking up the vertical surface as he lifted her. As soon as her hips reached the ledge, she twisted and sat on it, then swung her legs over.
He took a step back, giving her space. Standing, she dusted off her cute little bottom with her palms and shot him a wary glance. “I should probably go back to the inn.”
“You’re staying at Ocean Bluff?”
She nodded. “They have coffee there.”
“Not as good as Riley’s.”
She bit her lip and averted her eyes, indecision radiating from her. “I really shouldn’t.”
He could have said something to reassure her. He could have introduced himself, provided references, assured her she would be safe with him. He could have lied and told her he was noble
of spirit and pure of soul.
Instead, some crazy impulse seized him and he sang, so softly no one but she could possibly hear, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.”
***
This was crazy. She didn’t even know him—and she needed a shower.
Something peculiar had happened to her Saturday night, when that song had spilled from the jukebox at the Faulk Street Tavern and she and this man—this total stranger—had engaged in a staring contest as intense as a round of steamy sex.
That was a totally inappropriate thought. She gave her head a brisk shake and turned to view the ocean. The early morning sun hovered just inches above the horizon, painting a streak of splintered light across the waves.
Crazy.
Her whole life seemed crazy at the moment.
Her decision to stay on in Brogan’s Point was definitely crazy. She and Peter were supposed to drive back to Boston yesterday, but she’d sent Peter off alone. “I need more time here at the Ocean Bluff Inn. I think it’s the right place for our wedding, but I want to be sure.”
“I liked the mansion down in Newport better,” Peter had argued.
“I hated that place.” Resembling nothing so much as a downsized version of the Palace of Versailles, it had been much too opulent for her tastes, all that Louis XIV furniture, the murals of fat cherubs prancing across the walls, the gilt moldings and frenetic floral patterns on the rugs. People—not least of all the bride and groom—would be rendered invisible, surrounded by such hectic décor. “Besides, I’d like to check out some of those antique dealers we passed on the drive up here,” she’d told Peter. “I might find some gems for Shomback-Sawyer.”
“We can stop at a few of those places on the way home.” Peter had busied himself draping his shirts neatly on hangers inside his folding suitcase. He’d been so eager to leave, he’d started packing right after breakfast.
She had been even more eager to stay, to visit the antique dealers, yes, and to absorb the atmosphere of the Ocean Bluff Inn. And also to figure out what had happened when she’d heard the David Bowie song emanating from that wondrous jukebox Saturday night.
Changes (The Magic Jukebox Book 1) Page 2
