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