by Annie O'Neil
“I gotta go, Nate. Work.”
Her eyes darted across to the new staff rota. Maybe now Raphael had had a bit of acclimatizing he’d be all right with another partner.
“You better mean it, Dags. The thinking about it,” Nate said, his voice carrying a bit more warning than it usually did when he made his “time to come home” calls.
“Yeah.”
She clicked on the red handset symbol on her phone and felt the weight in her chest sink to her gut. No matter how many times she’d been home since she’d moved to Sydney fear still built in her chest as strongly as it had when she’d boarded the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport.
She’d buckled into her seat thinking she would have time. Time to tell her mum how much she loved her. How she had, at last, found her place in the world.
She’d disembarked to be told she had to find herself a black dress for her mother’s funeral.
She’d been three hours late.
One hundred and eighty minutes short of telling her mother she loved her.
“Looks like you and I are busted up forever, Mags.”
“What do you mean?” Maggie followed the line Steve was drawing along his neck before he flicked his thumb toward the new staff rota.
“No more you-and-me squad, from the looks of things. Tough luck. For Casey, at least. You’ve got yourself a cracking good partner. Not as good as me, of course...” Steve shrugged, shaking his head along with her as she finally connected the dots.
Maggie and Raphael were to be permanent partners.
She stared at the roster in horror. She hadn’t protested—much—when she and Raphael had been posted together for the first couple of rounds of shifts, but now it seemed the chief wanted him to be her permanent partner.
Her boss was plain cruel. Hadn’t he seen how hard she was finding it, working with a man who seemed to elicit every emotion she’d ever hidden from? Lust. Hurt. Complete and total unrequited love.
To name but a few.
Was she still attracted to him?
More than ever.
Was he an incredible doctor?
Hands down the best she’d ever worked with.
Did she want to be stuck in an ambulance with him for the rest of her working days, only for him to discover she hadn’t even come close to applying for medical school, let alone got in?
Not a chance in hell.
Whenever Raphael looked at her she felt as if she was being X-rayed. As if he was trying to figure out what had changed. What was different.
She could answer that easily enough. She wasn’t the person she’d let him believe she was when they’d been in Paris. And when she’d come home her whole world had changed.
For that one blissful year she hadn’t mentioned her Outback upbringing. Not once. She hadn’t exactly lied. There had been no fictional sophisticated past she’d had to scramble to remember. But she hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about the way she’d really been raised.
Not that she was embarrassed about it. She loved her family. Even if they were a bunch of lunkheads. It was just... They were so...content. And she’d always dreamed of life being so much more. Sometimes she envied how plain old-fashioned happy they were.
Pffft. Well. Stuck in an ambulance together for pretty much three entire days at a time, Raphael was bound to figure out she was a small-town girl whose dreams hadn’t really got her all that far.
Already her cheeks burnt with embarrassment at what she would have to admit to.
Years ago she had dreamt of working with Raphael. Scalpel by scalpel, suture by suture, as they approached each and every surgery with the same tenacity and joie de vivre they’d seemed to elicit in each other. Countless hours they’d spent talking about it—discussing which classes they’d need to take to get into pre-med programs, quizzing each other on the different disciplines they’d like to study.
Hand on heart, they had even jinxed each other after simultaneously shouting out, “Trauma surgeon!”
Jinxed was right. For her, at least.
That day as they’d sat near the Eiffel Tower—at her insistence, of course—she and Raphael had crossed their hearts and made up a silly handshake to confirm that they would each do everything in their power to work together as surgeons one day.
She’d truly believed all her dreams would come true. But when she’d returned home it was as if she’d never had them in the first place.
She’d remembered getting almost dizzy as they’d tipped their heads back and tried to see all the way up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, making a promise that in ten years’ time they would come back and compare notes. Then again in twenty.
Little had he known she was hoping they’d also be seeing each other every day in between.
Little had he known how the bubble of perfection she’d woven into her heart had shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces when she’d flown home the following day.
She watched now as her old partner made his way to his ambo, prepping it for the day’s jobs.
She sternly reminded herself that being a paramedic wasn’t second best. She loved it. Much more than she’d anticipated. It was a way of reaching people who often had no one else in their lives. She’d seen it countless times—particularly with the elderly. She loved knowing how a simple chat, a moment of human connection, was often all they were after. And she was more than happy to be the person to bring a smile to their face.
Besides, she was good at it. The human touch part. After she’d finally moved to Sydney she’d considered going to pre-med night classes, but life had got busy and she was always knackered at the end of her intense shifts.
At the end of the day, she’d given up on her hopes and dreams and Raphael hadn’t.
He was the most driven person she had ever met. Lycée. Pre-Med. Med School. Surgical Intern. Surgical Resident. He’d hit every one of his goals as if his life had depended upon it.
There wasn’t a chance in the universe he’d ever want to be with someone who had given up at the first hurdle. Even if it was the biggest hurdle she’d ever had to leap. This whole “slumming it” thing on a paramedic crew was obviously a blip on his timeline. Something he would look back on and wonder, Why did I do that?
“Maggie?”
The sound of Raphael’s voice threw Maggie’s tummy into its usual tailspin of swirls and loops. “I’ll meet you at the truck in five,” she called across to him, heading to the station chief’s office.
Masking how she felt about Raphael was getting harder and harder. Not only had it thrown her long-dormant feelings into full-on active volcano mode, but his brooding presence was also starting to impact her ability to treat her patients with one hundred percent focus.
That was a line she was completely unwilling to cross. And she wouldn’t leave her boss’s office until he understood her, loud and clear.
* * *
“Everything all right?” Maggie smiled across at Raphael as she clicked open her door, but the note of anxiety in her tone was echoed in her green eyes.
He nodded. He was the one who should really be asking her how she was doing. As if he didn’t already know.
She jumped out of the ambulance and closed the door with a solid clunk.
“I think he hates me.”
The words were still ringing in his ears nine hours into their shift. He’d overheard Maggie speaking to the station chief before they’d started work this morning. This was their third round of three days on, four off, and it looked as if she’d had enough of him. Perhaps coming to her favorite food truck was her way of letting him down gently. Sugaring the pill before letting him know that things simply weren’t working out.
He hung his head and gave the back of his neck a rough scrub. This wasn’t right. Just letting things fall apart. He had tried to make things right with Jean-Luc but it had been too
soon. Too fresh. He saw that now. But he had the ability to change the here and now.
“Stay with my little girl.”
He shrugged his shoulders up and down, then climbed out of the ambulance. He had to rid himself of the toxic emotions that had been feeding on each other, multiplying instead of diminishing. It was an unhealthy pattern and it needed to be broken.
The thought of losing Maggie was the spur he needed. He knew he wasn’t a barrel of laughs to work with, but hate? He didn’t hate her.
He admired her.
More than that.
He lifted his eyes up to the heavens for inspiration.
He was grateful to her. Grateful to this woman who’d unquestioningly helped him when he’d written to her from Vietnam. She hadn’t asked a single question. She’d simply helped. And when he’d arrived she hadn’t pressed, not having the remotest clue why he had changed from the laughing, trivia-obsessed pre-med student she’d met all those years ago to this darker version of the man he’d hoped to become.
She wasn’t the only one who’d stopped writing when they’d said goodbye all those years ago in Paris. But she was the one who had kept her heart open. The one he’d come to when his own heart had been worn raw with effort to atone for a mistake he could never change.
The simple truth was that Maggie Louis was the only person left on earth who treated him with respect.
A vinegary twist of guilt tightened in his gut. Not telling Maggie about his past—what he’d done that awful day at the hospital—was akin to lying to the one person who deserved his honesty more than most.
A shot of energy surged through him and gripped his heart.
He couldn’t lose her. Not now.
He hadn’t travelled around the world only to let her slip through his fingers. He’d lost Jean-Luc’s precious friendship. And Jean-Luc’s parents’. Not that the Couttards had spelled it out for him, but he knew there was no coming back from the loss of a beloved child and grandchild.
Well, he was damned if he was going to let Maggie slip away. Not this soon. Not without letting her see the real him.
She needed to know about the Raphael who’d grown up in a wealthy neighborhood—not in a beautifully appointed home like Jean-Luc’s, as he’d let her believe, but a few blocks away on an estate for low-income families. She needed to be told about the teenaged Raphael who had fallen head over heels for her but only offered friendship after Jean-Luc’s family had cautioned him to keep things platonic.
Maggie deserved to understand why he’d honored the request. How Jean-Luc’s family had all but raised him, virtually adopting him after his own parents had passed away the summer he’d finished Lycée. He couldn’t have compromised that level of support. Support he’d known he’d need if he were ever to come good on his dream of becoming a doctor.
The near-impoverished upbringing...the less than loving parents. They were things he’d been able to put behind him. And now he had to find a way to learn from the experience of Amalie’s surgery and put that behind him, too.
Maggie needed to know he’d become the man he’d promised her he would become one day. But now he’d lost track of that man. And he’d sought out the one person he thought could help find him again.
He closed the ambulance door behind him with a renewed sense of purpose. He would tell Maggie everything. And when the slate was clean he’d live with the ramifications.
She would either accept him or say goodbye. But he would not let her believe he hated her. Or let her “dump him” over a gourmet sandwich across the street from the beach. Not until she knew the truth anyway. After that, the decision was solely hers.
Raphael rounded the ambulance to where Maggie stood, glanced across at the brightly colored food truck, then back to Maggie. “So, this is the best food in Sydney?”
Start small. Aim high. Earn this. Earn the place in her heart.
She nodded. “I think so, but I suspect your standards may be a bit higher.”
“I’m always open to trying new things.”
Her eyebrows shot up, then cinched together. “Well... I like it, anyway. Hopefully you will, too.”
Lead. Balloon.
He was going to have to ramp up his conversation skills.
“Do you remember that last day we were in Paris?”
Her brow furrowed. Okay. It was a bit of a non sequitur, but he could see it so clearly.
“At the Eiffel Tower?”
She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I made you go there loads, didn’t I? You must’ve thought I was a right nutter.”
“Remember it was raining?”
She’d been twirling round one of the lampposts as if she was in a musical. It was the most free-spirited he’d ever seen her. There had been a fraction of a second when the ache to pull her into his arms and kiss her had been almost overwhelming, but he’d made a promise to the Couttards. That friends-only promise had been one of the hardest he’d ever had to keep.
“Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. So...” She sucked in a big breath and pasted on a smile. “Now it’s all sunshine and tucker trucks! Who would’ve thought it, eh? From Paris to...uh... Tuckerville.”
He arched a perplexed eyebrow.
“Tucker truck? Not heard of that? Food. Food is tucker. So...” She tipped her head toward the truck and gave a shy grin. “La cuisine...c’est superb!”
She exaggerated her French accent—a habit, he noted, that she fell back on when she was unsure of herself. The ache returned. The desire to kiss her. Hold her. Be the man she wanted to swing round lampposts and sing in front of.
He had to tell her. Tell her everything.
Together they took another step forward in the admittedly impressive queue, and after a moment she asked, “Don’t you have food trucks in France?”
He nodded. More with each passing year if memory served. Food might top most French people’s list of Important Things About Being Alive, but it hadn’t been anywhere on his radar during those last six months he’d been in Paris. Food had become merely something he had to consume in order to stay alive.
Maggie took in a big breath and popped on that nervous smile of hers again. “I probably should’ve brought you here the first day we worked together, but—” She stopped herself short.
He knew what she was going to say...what she should say. I would’ve brought you here earlier if you hadn’t had such an enormous thundercloud hanging over your head since you arrived. Or, as a more straightforward Australian would’ve said, If you hadn’t been so bloody rude after all the hospitality and kindness I’ve showed you.
“They say good things come to those who wait.”
His eyes drifted to the menu hung alongside the service windows of the silver caravan. He’d have to meet those catlike green eyes of Maggie’s soon. Answer her questions. Tell her the truth.
“Well, I know it’s just my opinion, but Betty’s Big Baps is totally worth the wait.” She grinned as she said the name. Then giggled. “I just love saying the name of this place. I don’t know if I love the name more, or the sandwiches.”
He tried to return her smile—the first genuine one he’d seen on her all shift.
Maggie didn’t miss the fact that the smile didn’t make it to his eyes.
She turned away and feigned interest in a couple of surfers joining the queue. They were laughing, regaling one another with stories of the waves they’d caught. Light. Free.
The two words caught his attention. He hadn’t felt either one in eighteen long months.
Driven. Determined. Committed. Those words worked.
Driven to do penance for his mistake? Determined to do—what? Go over and over a surgery he couldn’t re-do until the details eventually began to blur? Committed to staying out of Jean-Luc’s path to avoid any more painful confrontations?
That was a coward’s way out.
And he was no coward.
As his gaze returned to Maggie he was suddenly struck by the delicacy of her features. The smattering of freckles across her button nose. The gentle angles of her high cheekbones. The delicate swoop and dip at the apex of her upper lip. One that was begging to be traced with a finger. With a tongue. She was a beautiful woman. And he hated it that he was the reason behind the uncertainty in her gaze when their eyes finally met.
It’s not brain surgery. Start a conversation.
He nodded at the ten or so people in front of them. “What if we get a call?”
Nice one. Très bien. You really have mastered the art of embarking on a meaningful tête-à-tête, Raphael.
“No worries on that front,” she replied. “The station chief has promised us half an hour off before sending any more calls our way since we’ve been flat out all day. It’s worth the wait. Honest. You won’t have tasted anything like it before. C’est magnifique!”
A soft smile softened the usual hard set of his mouth. Maggie had been dappling her conversation with French with increasing frequency, but she was still twisting her forays into his native tongue into a comedic parody. As if she didn’t quite trust herself to just...speak. She’d been practically fluent when she’d left. Had all the confidence she’d gained over the course of her year in France disappeared?
The thought detonated another black hole in his chest.
He knew how easily confidence could take a knock.
When he’d walked out of that surgical room he’d been one hundred percent certain Amalie would make a full recovery. He had told himself that hanging around just to make sure was an instinct he wouldn’t have had if she’d been a stranger. Walking away was what he would’ve done with any other patient.
But ten minutes later it was as if he’d entered a different time and space continuum. He should have stayed. The instinct hadn’t been a case of emotional involvement. It had been a surgeon’s decision—and he’d gone against it.
His team of junior surgeons had tried their best to resuscitate her. He’d come as soon as he’d heard the Code Blue had been called. And it had still been too late.