Reunited With Her Parisian Surgeon. Annie O'Neil

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ