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
