by Annie O'Neil
Raphael’s heart was lost...
Until he found Maggie again!
Brooding surgeon Dr. Raphael Boucher finds his way to Sydney and the one woman he could never forget. Working together it’s clear Maggie Louis is the only one who can make him feel alive again. But first Raphael must return to Paris and resolve his past before they can finally be together.
“Absolument.” Raphael nodded. “I am completely ready to be a true Australian.”
Maggie couldn’t help herself. She sniggered. Then laughed. Then outright guffawed. “Raphael, I don’t think you could be a ‘true Australian’ even if you paddled backwards on a surfboard, dropped snags down your throat, chased them up with a slab of stubbies, all with a school of sharks circling round you. You’re just too...” She held her hands open in front of him as if it was completely obvious.
“Oui?” Raphael looked straight down that Gallic nose of his, giving her a supercilious look.
“What is it that I am too much of, Maggie?”
“Umm...well...French.”
The warm evening air grew thick. Whether it was an impending rainstorm or the tightening of an invisible tension that had snapped taut between them, she wasn’t sure. Her body ached to step in closer. To put her hands on his chest.
“I suppose I will have to rely on you to help me,” he said.
It would be so easy to kiss you right now.
“Maggie?”
Oh, God. She was staring. Those eyes of his... Again, the bright blue was shadowed with something dark.
What happened to you since we last met?
Dear Reader,
Quite a few of the elements of this story may ring some bells with you if you took the quizzes we had on our Love is the Best Medicine blog last year. We built a hero, a heroine and now, at long last, we have given them a shot at an HEA!
Thank you so much for being a part of this story. I really enjoyed reading all of your responses to the quizzes. Putting together the story was a bit nail-biting and I truly hope you like what I’ve done with their story. Thank you as well for visiting our blog, reading our books and being fans of Harlequin Medical Romance. You are appreciated!
xx Annie O’
REUNITED WITH HER PARISIAN SURGEON
Annie O’Neil
Books by Annie O’Neil
Harlequin Medical Romance
Italian Royals
Tempted by the Bridesmaid
Claiming His Pregnant Princess
Paddington Children’s Hospital
Healing the Sheikh’s Heart
Hot Latin Docs
Santiago’s Convenient Fiancée
Christmas Eve Magic
The Nightshift Before Christmas
The Monticello Baby Miracles
One Night, Twin Consequences
One Night...with Her Boss
London’s Most Eligible Doctor
Her Hot Highland Doc
Her Knight Under the Mistletoe
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This one definitely goes out to our readers. Without you this book literally could not have been made. You are the ones who built this hero and heroine... I hope you enjoy their story.
xx Annie O’
Praise for Annie O’Neil
“Santiago’s Convenient Fiancée...is a vibrant, passionate love story with a medical backdrop that adds the drama quotient to this already captivating story.”
—Goodreads
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM FROM BACHELOR TO DADDY BY MEREDITH WEBBER
CHAPTER ONE
SCENT. SOUND. TASTE. Even the air felt different in Australia; so did the sea water he was ploughing through. But as the days had bled into weeks, then months, Raphael had come to know that travelling halfway round the world hadn’t made a blind bit of difference. He was still carrying the same hollowed-out heart, weighted with an anvil’s worth of guilt. Leaving Paris hadn’t done a damn thing towards relieving the burden.
Volunteering had done nothing. Neither had working in conflict zones. Nor donating blood and platelets. He would have pulled his heart right out of his chest if he’d thought it would help. Working all day and all night hadn’t helped. And then there was money. Heaven knew he’d tried to throw enough of that at the situation, only to make a bad situation worse.
Jean-Luc didn’t want any of his money. Not anymore.
The truth was a simple one. Nothing could change the fact that his best friend’s daughter had died on his operating table.
He’d known he was too close to her. He’d known he shouldn’t have raised so much as a scalpel when he’d seen who the patient was. The injuries she’d suffered. But there had been no one more qualified. And Jean-Luc had begged him. Begged him to save his daughter’s life.
Raphael thought through each excruciatingly long minute they’d been in surgery for the millionth time.
Clamps. Suction. Closing the massive traumatic aortic rupture only to have another present itself. Clamps. More suction. Stiches. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. He could see his fingers knotting each one in place. Ensuring blood flow returned to her kidneys. Her heart.
Her young body had responded incredibly well to the surgery. A miracle really, considering the massive trauma she’d suffered when the car had slammed into hers. All that had been left to do when he’d been called to the adjacent operating theatre was close her up.
No matter how many times he went through it, he stalled at the critical moment. There’d been two choices. He’d taken one path. He should’ve chosen the other. His one fatal error had built to that leaden silence when he’d returned to the operating theatre to see his junior lifting his hands up and away from her small, lifeless body.
They’d looked to him to call the time of death.
Raphael swam to the edge of the pool, blinking away the sea water, almost surprised to see that the sun was beginning to set. He pulled himself up and out of the pool in one fluid move, vaguely aware of how the exertion came easily now that he was trying to burn away the memories with lap after lap.
He was tired now. Exhausted, if he was being truly honest. Coming here to Sydney was his last-ditch attempt to find the man he had once been. The man buried beneath a grief he feared would haunt him until his dying day. He was driving himself to swim harder than he ever had before—churning the seaside pool into a boiling froth around him as he hit one side, dove, twisted, and then started again to see how soon he could hit the other—but his burning lungs did nothing to assuage the heaviness of his heart.
Love could.
And forgiveness could do so much more.
In fewer than twenty-four hours he’d see Maggie...
The years since he’d seen her last seemed incalculable. He remembered her vividly. A clear-eyed, open-hearted exchange student from Australia. Apart from Jean-Luc there had been no one in his life who had ever known h
im so well, who had seen straight through to his soul.
If, when they met again, she could see a glimmer of the man she’d known all those years ago he’d know there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
After toweling off in the disappearing rays of the sun, he tugged on a long-sleeved T-shirt and headed for the exit, already conditioned to look toward the white fence on the right, leading out of the baths towards the coastal path.
Le petit monstre de la mer.
He was still there. The cock-eared mutt that had been following him from his rented accommodation, along the coastal path to the Bronte Baths and back since he’d arrived in Sydney a week ago.
A reject from former tenants?
There were no tags, no chips. Nothing to identify him or his owners.
It shocked him that he’d cared enough to take the dog to a vet the day before.
At least it proved there was still a heart thumping away in his chest, doing more than was mechanically required.
He huffed out a mirthless laugh.
Or was it just proof that he desperately needed one soul in his life who wasn’t judging him? Who still wanted his company?
He winced away the thought. That wasn’t fair. After over a decade of virtually no contact, Maggie hadn’t merely agreed to meet up with him tomorrow night. She’d found him a job at her paramedic station. She’d gone above and beyond the call of a long-ago friendship.
The memory of her bright green eyes softened the hard set of his jaw.
From what she’d said in her emails, the under-staffed ambulance station sounded like a non-stop grind. Perhaps, at long last, this would be the beginning of the healing he’d been seeking, after eighteen months on the run from the pain he’d caused.
He certainly didn’t trust himself on a surgical ward. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps never.
“Allons-y, Monster.” He tipped his head towards the street and the dog quickly met his long-stride pace. “Let’s see if we can find you some supper.”
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. Sh
e’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...