Loe raamatut: «Reunited With Her Parisian Surgeon»

CHAPTER TWO

TICK-TOCK. TICK-TOCK.

Why had she brought him to a movie?

Raphael was going to think she hated him. But, no, she was just socially inept. And she wasn’t quite ready for him to meet the “real” Maggie.

Maggie’s phone buzzed in her backpack, adding to her mortification. She dragged the bag out from under her seat and fished around until she found it. Working in the emergency services meant checking your phone every time it beeped or buzzed, whether or not you were sitting next to your teenage crush from the most perfect year you’d ever had.

A year in Paris.

Raphael Bouchon.

Match. Made. In. Heaven.

Not that there’d been any romance. Just a one-sided crush that had come to an abrupt end when she’d boarded the plane back to Australia.

She pushed the button on her phone to read the message.

Dags, Dad needs more of those hyper-socks next time you come.

She speed-typed back.

They’re compression socks, you dill.

Her expression softened. Her brothers were doing their best in the face of their father’s ever-changing blood pressure. They were mechanics, not medics.

She glanced across at Raphael. I could’ve been a surgeon, like you.

An unexpected sting of tears hit her at the back of her throat so she refocused on her phone.

See you in a couple of weeks with a fresh supply. Maggie xx

She jammed the phone back into her backpack and suppressed the inevitable sigh of frustration. Moving to Sydney was more of a hassle than it was worth sometimes. But staying in Broken Hill forever? Uh-uh. Not an option.

She dropped her pack beneath her chair and readjusted in her stadium-style seat, only to succeed in doing what she’d been trying to avoid all night—grazing her thigh along Raphael’s.

“Desolé.” Raphael put his hand where his knee had just knocked Maggie’s and gave it an apologetic pat.

She stared at his hand. Long, gorgeous, surgeon’s fingers. Strong. Assured. Not the type of fingers that caressed the likes of her lowly paramedic’s knees.

Wait a minute.

Had it been a caress? If it had been then this whole high school reunion thing was swiftly turning into a dream come true. If not...

She glanced across at him and saw he wasn’t even looking at her. His bright blue eyes were glued to the flickering screen twenty or so rows ahead of them. Fair enough, considering they were at a movie, but...

“Non, c’est—it’s all right.”

Maggie fumbled her way through an unnecessary response, all the while crossing her legs, tucking her toes behind her calf to weave her legs together and make herself as small as possible. If they didn’t touch again, and she could somehow drill it into her pea-sized brain that Raphael wasn’t fabricating excuses to touch her, then maybe—just maybe—she’d stop feeling as if she’d just regressed back to her sixteen-year-old, in-love-with-Raphael self.

Ha! Fat chance of that happening.

Tall, dark and broodingly handsome, Raphael Bouchon would have to head back to France without so much as a C’est la vie! if she were ever going to give up the ghost of a dream that there had once been something between them to build upon.

The second she’d laid eyes on him tonight Maggie’s body had been swept straight back to the giddy sensations she’d felt as a teen.

Two hours in, she was still feeling the effects. Despite the typically warm, late-summer Australian evening, all the delicate hairs on her arms were standing straight up. The hundredth wave of goose pimples was rippling along her spine, keeping time with the swoosh and wash of waves upon the shores of Botany Bay. Off in the distance, the magical lights of Sydney’s famed harbor-front were glowing and twinkling, mimicking the warm sensation of fireflies dancing around her belly.

The outdoor cinema in Sydney’s Botanical Gardens was the perfect atmosphere for romance. Perfect, that was, if Raphael had been showing the slightest bit of interest in her.

It would’ve helped if she didn’t feel like a Class A fraud. Yammering on about living the high life in Sydney as they’d walked through the gardens toward the cinema instead of being honest had been a bad move. How could she tell him, after he’d achieved so much, that her “high life” entailed a pokey flat that needed an epic cleaning session, a virtually round-the-clock work schedule and quarterly trips to the Outback to tackle the piles of laundry her brothers had left undone.

Hardly the life of a glamorous city girl.

She was such a fraud!

Not to mention all of the appalling “Franglais” that had been falling out of her mouth since she and Raphael had met at the entrance to the gardens. Every single stern word she’d had with herself on the bus journey there had all but disappeared from her head. Including the reminder that this was not a date. Just an old friend showing another old friend around town.

Nothing. More.

The second she’d laid eyes on him...

Total implosion of all her platonic intentions.

Whether it was because thirty-year-old Raphael was even better looking than seventeen-year-old Raphael, or whether it was the fact that looking just a little...haunted added yet another layer of intriguing magnetism to the man, she wasn’t sure. Either way, Raphael had the same powerful effect on her that he’d had the first time they’d met at her host family’s home all those years ago.

Jean-Luc. A twist of guilt because she hadn’t kept in touch with him either cinched her heart.

She’d had a lot on her plate when she’d come home. She wasn’t Super Girl. She couldn’t do everything.

She readjusted in her seat and gave herself a little shake. Just watch the movie and act normal!

About three seconds passed before she unwove her legs and twisted them the other way round. She’d seen Casablanca a thousand times—could quote it line for line and had planned to do so tonight, back when she’d had just the one ticket...

Maggie dropped her eyelids and attempted another sidelong glimpse at the man she’d known as a boy.

His expression was intense and focused, though the rest of the audience was chuckling at one of Humphrey Bogart’s dry comments. Smiling was not Raphael’s thing.

Not anymore, anyway.

Back in Paris it had been an entirely different story. At least when they’d been together. His laugh had brightened everything, every day. It had made life appear in Technicolor.

Not that his surprise reconnection on social media had come in the form of an emotional email declaring his undying love for her—a love that demanded to be sated in the form of his flying halfway across the world to fulfil a lifelong dream of making sweet, magical love to her.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

His email had been polite. To the point. Bereft of what her father called “frilly girlie add-ons”. Silly her for thinking that vital little details like why he’d decided to get in touch and move to Sydney after years of successfully pursuing an emergency medicine surgical career without so much as a bonjour were “facts.”

Picking a movie as their first meeting hadn’t exactly been a prime choice in eliciting more information either. It had just seemed a simpler way of easing back into a friendship she wasn’t entirely sure existed anymore.

Back in Paris he might not have had romantic feelings for her, but there had been no doubting that their friendship had been as tight as they came.

Her eyes shifted in Raphael’s direction. Seeing the sorrow, or something a lot like it, etched into his features had near enough stopped Maggie’s heart from beating when they’d met up earlier that evening. Not that he was the only one who had changed...

She shivered, remembering the day she’d flown home from France as vividly as if it were yesterday. Seeing her brothers at the arrivals gate instead of her mum...their expressions as sorrowful as she had ever known them...

Leaving France had felt physically painful, but arriving home...

Arriving home had been devastating.

How could she not have known her mother was so ill?

She dug her fingernails into her palms and blew a tight breath between her lips.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just...life.

Her breath lodged in her throat as Raphael’s gaze shifted from the massive outdoor cinema screen to Maggie’s arms.

He leaned in closer, his voice soft as he asked, “T’as froid?”

“Cold? Me? No. This is Australia! Sydney, anyway,” Maggie corrected, her nervous laugh jangling in her ears as she rubbed her hands briskly along her arms. Just about the most ridiculous way to prove she was actually quite warm enough, thank you very much.

Being in lust did that to a girl.

That, and haphazardly wading her way through a state of complete and utter mental mayhem.

Sitting next to Raphael Bouchon was like being torn in two. Half of her heart was beating with huge, oxygen-filled thumps of exhilaration, while the other half was pounding like the hoofbeats of a racehorse hell-bent on being anywhere but here.

Raphael shifted in his chair and pulled his linen jacket off the back of his seat, brushing his knee against hers as he did. Accidentally. Of course. That was the only way things like that happened to her.

Just like Raphael “deciding on a change” and moving to Australia to become a paramedic. At her local station.

Sure she’d offered to help him, completely convinced it would never actually happen. And yet here they were, thigh to thigh, sitting in the middle of the Botanical Gardens, watching a movie under another balmy summer night’s sky.

Raphael held his linen jacket up to her with an It’s yours if you want it expression on his face. He was so earnest. And kind. Not to mention knee-wobblingly gorgeous.

“Megarooni gorge”, as her friend Kelly would say. Kelly would’ve been slipping into that jacket and climbing onto Raphael’s lap in the blink of an eye. Kelly had confidence.

Maggie...? Not so much. Just the thought of climbing onto Raphael’s lap reduced her insides to a jittery mass of unfulfillable expectation.

So she waved off his kind gesture, mouthing, No, thank you, all the while rubbing her hands together and blowing on them as she did.

Nutter. What are you doing?

“Please,” Raphael whispered, and his French accent danced along the back of her neck as he shifted the silk lining of the coat over her shoulders. “I insist.”

“Merci.” She braved the tiniest soupçon of French as she pulled the jacket and Raphael’s spicy man-scent closer round her. She mentally thunked herself on the forehead. Why was she acting like such a dill?

As if the answer wasn’t sitting right next to her on the open-air theater’s bleacher seating, looking like a medical journal centerfold.

Raphael Bouchon, Casablanca and the glass of champagne he had insisted upon buying her while they were waiting for the film to start were all adding up to one thing: the most embarrassing exchange student reunion ever. Besides, it wasn’t like a first date, when—

Whoa!

It’s not a date. This is not a date. You are showing an obviously bereaved, gorgeous friend from high school around Sydney. That’s. It. The fact that his arrival coincided with a non-refundable ticket to the Starlight Cinema and the most romantic film ever is sheer coincidence. And practical. Waste not, want not. And that includes Raphael.

At least that was what she’d keep telling herself.

Along with the reminder that this movie ended with a friendship. Nothing more.

She looked down to her fingers when she realized she was totting up the number of short-lived boyfriends who hadn’t made the grade over the years. Expecting anything different when everyone had been held up to The Raphael Standard was hardly a surprise. Inaccessible. Unattainable. Dangerously desirable.

And here she was. Platonically sitting next to the man himself. Not flirting. Not reveling in the protective comfort of his jacket around her shoulders. Not trying to divine any hidden meaning behind the chivalrous gesture no one had ever shown her before. Nor was she sneaking the occasional sidelong glimpse of his full Gallic lips. The cornflower-blue eyes that defied nature. The slightly over-long chestnut hair that all but screamed for someone to run their fingers through it. Someone like her.

And yet...

The mischievous glint in his eyes that she remembered so vividly from high school hadn’t shown up once tonight. And even though he’d only just turned thirty, the salt and pepper look had made significant inroads into his dark brown hair. The little crinkles beside his eyes that she might have ascribed to smiling only appeared when his eyebrows drew close together and his entire visage took on a faraway look, as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d found himself almost twenty thousand kilometers away from home.

It didn’t take a mind-reader to figure out that his relocation halfway around the world was a way to put a buffer between himself and some dark memories. This was not a man looking for a carefree year with a Down Under lover.

Not that she would’ve been on his list of possible paramours. She wasn’t anywhere close to Raphael’s league. The fact that she was sitting next to him at all was a “bloody blinder of a miracle” as her Aussie rules footie-playing brothers would say, midway through giving her a roughhouse knuckle duster.

Sigh...

Maggie feigned another quick rearrangement of her hair from one shoulder to the other, trying to divine whether Raphael was genuinely enjoying the al fresco film experience. Or cinema en plein air, as he had reminded her in his chocolate-rich voice as her rusty French returned in dribs and drabs. There hadn’t been much call for it over the years.

She swung her eyes low and to the left. Yup. Still gorgeous.

As opposed to her.

She was a poorly coordinated, fashion-challenged dork in contrast to Raphael’s effortlessly elegant appearance. Not that he’d said anything of the sort when he’d first caught sight of her at their prearranged rendezvous point. Rendezvous? Get her! Far from it. He’d even complimented her on her butterfly print vintage skirt and the “land girl” knotted top she’d dragged out of the back of her closet. Not because it was the prettiest outfit she owned, but because it was the only thing that was ironed apart from her row of fastidiously maintained uniforms.

Appearances weren’t everything. She was proof of that. Freckle-faced redheads were every bit as competent as the next person. Well...maybe not literally, seeing as the person sitting next to her was a surgeon and she was “just” a paramedic. Anyway, her hair was more fiery auburn than carrot-orange. On a good day.

When they’d first met, in the corridors of the Parisian Lycée, she’d shaken off her small-town-girl persona and found the butterfly she’d always thought had been living in her heart. Well...a nerdy butterfly. Raphael had been every bit as nerdy as she back then. Or so she’d thought. But he’d called it...academically minded. He had been the best friend of her host’s brother and she’d fallen head over heels in love with him.

Her mother had been right when she’d cheekily told her daughter to keep her eye on the “Nerd Talent.” Now, at thirty years old, Raphael was little short of movie-star-gorgeous. His tall, reedy body had filled out so that he was six-foot-something of toned man magnificence. His chestnut hair looked rakishly windswept and interesting. He looked like a costume drama hero who’d just jumped off his horse after a long ride along the clifftops in search of his heroine.

Whether his cheekbones were über-pronounced because of the weight he claimed to have lost on his travels or because his genes were plain old superior was unclear. Either way, he was completely out-of-this-world beautiful.

Even the five o’clock shadow that she thought looked ridiculous on most other blokes added a rugged edge to a man who clearly felt at ease in the most sophisticated cities in Europe. Although she would bet her last dollar he’d do just fine in the Outback too. His body confidence spoke of a man who could change a car tire with one hand and chop wood with the other.

Not that she’d been imagining either scenario. Much.

Those blue eyes of his still had those crazy long black lashes...but shadows crossed his clear azure irises more often than not...

As if feeling the heat in her gaze, Raphael looked away from the flickering screen, giving her a quick glance and a gentle smile as she accidentally swooshed her out-of-control hair against his arm. The most outlandish hair in Oz, she called it. If she wanted it curly it went straight. Straight? It went into coils. Why she didn’t just chop it all off, as her brothers regularly suggested, was beyond her.

Again she stared at the half-moons her nails had pressed into her hands. After her mum passed it had seemed as if her hair was the one thing she had left in her life that was genuinely feminine. So she’d vowed to keep it—no matter how thick and wild it became.

“So!” Raphael turned to her, with that soft, barely there smile of his that never quite made it to a full-blown grin playing upon his lips. “Did you have anything else in mind?”

Maggie threw a panicked look over her shoulder.

Like holding hands underneath the starlit sky?

Gazing adoringly into one another’s eyes in between soul-quenching kisses?

She glanced at the screen and to her horror realized the credits were running. Sitting beside him and not making a complete fool of herself had been hard enough, but—Oh, crikey. She hoped he didn’t expect her to conduct an actual conversation in French. It had been hard enough when she was in her teens, but now that she hadn’t spoken a word in over thirteen years...

All of her tingly, flirty feelings began to dissolve in an ever-growing pool of insecurity.

“Sheesh. Sorry, mate... Raphael. Sorry, sorry...”

She stumbled over a few more apologies. Years of being “one of the guys” at work and growing up as the tomboy kid sister in a house full of blokey blokes had rendered her more delicate turns of phrase—if she had ever had them—utterly obsolete.

She puffed up her cheeks and blew out a big breath, trying to figure out what would be best. A meat pie and a pint?

She took in a few more blinks’ worth of Raphael, patiently waiting for her to get a grip, and dismissed the idea. French people didn’t go out for meat pies and pints! Why had her brain chosen this exact moment to block out everything she could remember about France?

Oysters? Caviar? More champagne?

Crêpes! French people loved them. Sydneysiders did, too.

There was a mobile crêpe caravan she’d visited a couple of times when she was in between patients. She grabbed her backpack and began pawing around for her mobile to try and find out where it might be parked up tonight.

What was it called? Suzettes? Flo’s Flaming Pancakes?

“Actually...” Raphael put his hand on Maggie’s forearm to stop her frantic excavation. “As I am starting work tomorrow morning, perhaps we’ll take a rain check?”

Maggie nodded along as he continued speaking. Something about heartfelt thanks for her help in getting him the job. The stacks of paperwork she’d breezed through on his behalf.

In truth, it was far easier to stand and smile while she let herself be swept away with the rhythm and musical cadence of each word coming out of Raphael’s mouth than to actually pay attention to what he was saying. Each word presented itself as a beautiful little stand-alone poem—distinctly unlike the slang-heavy lingo she’d brought with her from her small-town upbringing.

That year in Paris had been her mother’s last gift to her. A glimpse of what the rest of the world had to offer.

She’d found out, all right. In spades.

A glimpse of Raphael’s world, more like. And she wasn’t just talking about trips to a museum.

For her there was only one Raphael and he was standing right here, speaking perfectly fluent English, his mouth caressing each vowel and cherishing each consonant so that when his throat collaborated with his tongue and the words hit the ether each word was like an individually wrapped sweet.