Reunited with Her Parisian Surgeon

by Annie O'Neil

  Raphael looked to Maggie, hoping for some sort of cue on how to respond to the question. Another eye-roll answered his raised brows.

  “What is a Daggie?” he asked instead.

  Her brothers fell about laughing so hard they were near enough swiping tears from their eyes.

  “Please.” Maggie drew in a deep breath and shook her head. “Do not pay attention to the cave people in my life. A ‘dag’, if you must know, is an Aussie term for a person who is a bit...” Her green eyes flicked up to the sky as she sought the right definition. “Someone who is a bit like we were in high school.”

  “She’s trying to say an A-Grade nerd,” Nate jumped in, giving his sister another friendly knuckleduster.

  “Aw, mate! So you were a nerd?” Billy’s friendliness shot up a notch. “Got it. One of the book squad. Makes sense.”

  Maggie flushed a bit. “No, boys. I was a nerd. But Raphael...he was...” For an infinitesimal moment their eyes caught and then her brothers started gabbling away again.

  What had she been about to say? The flush on her cheeks suggested she was glad she hadn’t said it. The cinch in his heart wished she had.

  “Who’s this little creature, eh?” Ed knelt down and called Monster to him.

  Raphael unclipped the lead, surprised to see Monster run to Ed, tail wagging, virtually jumping up and down with anticipation of getting scratched behind the ears.

  “His name’s Monster. He’s looking for a home.”

  Ed sent him a sharp look. “What? This little guy’s not yours? What’d you do? Kidnap him?”

  “He adopted Raphael back in Sydney,” Maggie jumped in giving Raphael a curious look.

  Monster lay on his back and wiggled his paws in the air, easily wooing Ed into giving his furry belly a good old scrub.

  The dog was obviously drawn to him. And Raphael couldn’t blame him. By all appearances Ed was a settled, happy, solid guy. A man content with life and his place in it.

  The type of man he needed to be before he took the next step in loving Maggie. And he wanted to take that step. But with one foot still firmly cemented in the past he didn’t know how.

  “It looks like Monster’s affections have changed...” Raphael lifted up his hands, as if to add, He’s yours if you want him, but instantly he felt the loss of his little four-legged companion.

  Now it was Maggie’s turn to shoot daggers at him.

  He swallowed.

  What was he doing? Giving away Monster was akin to saying au revoir to Maggie in the crudest way possible. Bidding her farewell by proxy.

  “Hey, Mags...” Nate sidled over to his sister’s side and gave her a poke in the ribs. “I don’t know if Frenchie is going to like our plans for dinner.”

  “Why?” Maggie shot an alarmed look between her brothers, then leveled her gaze at her father. “Dad...what have you let these larrikins dream up? Wait a minute!” She held up her hands, her jaw dropping. “You’re not actually telling me you’ve made dinner all by yourselves.”

  They all laughed uproariously.

  Raphael guessed that was a “no” on the homemade supper, then.

  Maggie’s father smiled mischievously and stroked his stubbled chin. “I think I’d better let your brothers explain about your birthday pressie.”

  “Birthday?” Raphael sent her a questioning look. “You didn’t say it was your birthday.”

  Ed, or maybe it was Billy, slung a congenial arm across his shoulder. “She’s a sly one, our Dags. Doesn’t say half of what goes on in that big ol’ brain of hers. That’s why we thought she deserved a bit of TLC from her big brothers.”

  “What? TLC in the form of letting me clean your house, do your laundry and make my own cake?” Maggie’s hands flew to her hips and an indignant expression that ought to have elicited steam from her ears hit her face. “Yeah. You guys really know how to treat a girl.”

  Nate guffawed. “Laundry’s all done, Mags. All you have to do is get yourself scrubbed up for a night on the town. And...” he flicked a thumb at Raphael “...your mate here can tag along if he wants, but I don’t know if it’ll really float his bateau.”

  Raphael smiled. Not as much of a country bumpkin as he let on, then. He’d have to be careful. He’d have to win her brothers over. Without their approval he didn’t stand a chance.

  Maggie eyed the lot of them skeptically. The lot of her family, that was. Her eyes failed to connect with Raphael’s.

  If he’d known it was her birthday...

  He would’ve what? Bought her a diamond ring and asked her to marry him?

  “What have you boys planned?” Maggie’s eyes crackled with impatience.

  Some of that ire had to have been fuelled by him. Surprise parties were usually met with a smile.

  “It’s a secret,” Billy said, tapping the side of his nose and then giving his sister a scan. “Got anything a bit more girlie than what you’re wearing right now?”

  Maggie’s lids lowered as she evil-eyed her brothers, who collectively started kicking at the dirt and looking at the sky as if they weren’t hearing a word of the conversation.

  “Again, I ask you. What have you planned?”

  “Perhaps you should head on down to the hotel and get changed. For tonight.”

  “Hotel? What happened to my room?”

  “Aw, yeah...about that.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  Maggie’s heart was thumping so hard in her chest she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had started ricocheting around under her blouse. What on earth was going on? This morning Raphael had been the picture of an adoring...what? Boyfriend? Lover? And now that he’d met her family he was giving them his dog and looking as if he’d rather be anywhere but here.

  Terrific.

  Just as she’d predicted. Who would want to take on a family as mad as hers?

  No one. That was who.

  And, to make matters worse, she didn’t even have her childhood bed to throw herself on and sob away her loss.

  “It’s been a while since you’ve lived here, Mags...” Nate scrubbed his hands through his short strawberry-blond hair. “We reckoned you weren’t coming back so we sort of made it into a storeroom.”

  A level of hurt she hadn’t expected to feel filled her gut.

  “A storeroom?”

  “Yeah. You know—extra parts for cars and suchlike. Billy put in some shelves. It looks good.” There was a note of apology in his voice, but not enough to say, Welcome home, sis.

  Maggie knew she didn’t have the right to protest. She’d been gone a long time. Years. And had given no indication that she would ever be moving back.

  “Don’t pull a face like that, Mags. As I said, there’s no need to throw your swag blanket under the stars or anything. We got you a room at the hotel.”

  Ed picked up the “no worries” mantle and gave a carefree shrug. “Ralph can stay here.”

  “Raphael,” she ground out. “It’s Raphael.” Her eyes widened. “Wait. Why would he stay here?”

  “Well, there was only one room left at the hotel.” Her brother gave her a no-brainer face. “And that’s yours.”

  “Yeah, well, I—”

  I’d rather stay with Raphael?

  She shot him a Help me out, here, look, not a little worried about his response. Or lack of one. Was he going to stand up for her, as he had with the knickers and the policeman at the crash site? Throw an arm around her shoulder with a she’s-with-me attitude emanating from his every pore?

  A hit of regret that she hadn’t put on her Super Girl knickers that morning jagged through her. This morning she’d felt so sure! So certain of herself. Of Raphael.

  Before she had a moment to process the expression developing on Raphael’s face Billy was elbowing past Ed while pulling something out of his back pocket.

  He p
resented her with a pink envelope with tiny little strawberries laced around the edges. All of the breath left Maggie’s lungs in an instant. When she saw her name written in her mother’s delicate script tears blurred her vision.

  “Here, Mags. We found this when we cleaned out your room.”

  “What is it?”

  He shrugged and stared at it, as if seeing it for the first time. “Well, I dunno, do I? It’s addressed to you. We found it behind your headboard.” His voice turned a bit gruff as he continued, “Mum must’ve put it under your pillow, or something, before she—you know. She must’ve left it for you.”

  He held the envelope out and shook it in a gesture for her to take it. With trembling fingers she reached out, took the envelope in her hand and pressed it to her heart.

  “Right.” Billy clapped his hands together and shook the obvious swell of memories from his expression. “Since no one seems particularly keen on changing into their fancy duds, whaddya think about heading into town and getting this show on the road?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  AFTER AGREEING TO leave Monster at the family home while they headed into town, Raphael and Maggie climbed into the car. As he clicked the door shut Raphael felt the confines of the vehicle make Maggie’s mood significantly more pronounced.

  Whether it was the unopened letter, his insensitive behavior, her brothers or all three was difficult to divine. The least he could do was start setting the record straight in his corner. He did love her. He did want her. But he needed to put some things right in his own house before he could offer her full access to his heart.

  The wheels screeched as she turned a corner.

  “Thank you for inviting me here. It’s wonderful to see where you grew up and meet your family.”

  “Well, it’s not over yet,” Maggie grumbled, her eyes flicking to her rearview mirror to see where her brothers were following in a Louis men convoy.

  “Your family seem to love you very much,” he tried.

  “If treating me like a twelve-year-old virgin is the definition of love then—” She stopped herself. “Well, yeah, they do love me, but...” Her tone suggested familial love wasn’t the problem.

  If only she knew what it felt like to have the people you loved most—the people you saw as family—withdraw their affections, she would understand what he was going through. But until he had it completely figured out he didn’t want to muddle things more than he already had, so he lumbered ahead, trying to make a light joke of things.

  “You don’t like surprises?”

  The look on her face indicated that he shouldn’t be looking to start a career in stand-up comedy anytime soon.

  “Not when I’ve just opened my heart to someone and they go and offer to give their bloody dog away because they don’t even know if they’re sticking around, I don’t,” she snapped.

  “I shouldn’t have done that. With Monster...” he admitted. “And nothing’s set in stone.”

  “So.” She clapped a hand against the center component of the steering wheel. “What exactly does this mean? Will you be coming back to Sydney with me or will you be flying back to Paris straight out of Broken Hill?”

  “You can do that?”

  The second the words left his mouth he knew it was the worst thing he could have said. And the one thing he needed to do.

  The ominous mood around Maggie grew and multiplied until it all but developed into a force field around her.

  “Maggie, please.”

  “Maggie, please...what?”

  Maggie’s emotion was barely contained. Her eyes were glassed with obvious frustration as her foot became a bit heavier on the pedal. Not exactly the ideal mood for driving.

  “Please pull over the car. Let’s talk about this.”

  “We’re here anyway,” she snapped, abruptly yanking the car into a space in front of one of the traditional hotels that dominated the main street.

  “Maggie—” Raphael reached out to touch her arm and she pulled it away.

  “Don’t.” She turned in her seat to face him. “Don’t do that if all you want to do is to leave. I’ve missed enough in my life because of you!”

  She covered her mouth and gasped, tears immediately cascading down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t your fault. That was a horrible thing to say. It wasn’t your fault at all.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  The over-familiar sensation of dread—of guilt—began creeping into his bloodstream.

  “Missing my mum. Not seeing her before she died.”

  A buzzing began in his ears as he struggled to make the connections. Maggie had never told him the whole story. Though she rarely alluded to it, he knew her mother was no longer alive, but he hadn’t pressed, well aware that his own ghosts were hard enough to contain without forcing someone else to release theirs.

  He pulled a fresh handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. It was one of the few lessons he’d learned from his own mother before she’d succumbed to the temptations of drink—“Il ne faut rien laisser au hazard,” she would say, pressing a single, freshly ironed square of cloth into his hand each morning.

  Leave nothing to chance.

  It had been their one moment of true connection each day. The last thing she’d said to him before she’d passed away. And Maggie had missed that own moment with her mother.

  Leave nothing to chance.

  The words lodged in his heart.

  They spoke of action. Risk.

  Was opening his heart to more rejection a risk he was prepared to take?

  Maggie steadied her breath and began to speak. “We’d planned... Well... I’d been dreaming of a trip to France ever since I read Beauty and the Beast when I was little.”

  She went on to detail how she and her mother had planned the trip in meticulous detail. How her mother had been secretly scrimping and saving ever since they’d first read the fairy tale and Maggie had become transfixed. A dreamy-eyed country girl going to the most magical place in the world...

  “Going to Paris was a dream come true.”

  “And your mother? What happened while you were away?”

  Maggie swiped a few more tears away and sniffed, unable to meet his eyes. “I didn’t know it, but she had lung cancer.”

  Conflicting emotions threatened to split him in two.

  Half of him ached to reach out and touch her, hold her in his arms and tell her how sorry he was for her loss. The other half respected the determined look on Maggie’s face, her need to tell the story once and never again. He nodded for her to continue. He’d hear her out and then he’d leave. He’d face his own demons head-on, as she was doing here in Broken Hill.

  “She was pretty far along when I left, but we all thought it was something else. Something curable. She told us her cough was asthma-related.” Anguish filled her voice as she continued, “We didn’t know! I didn’t know. My brothers eventually made her tell them the truth, and she started to get treatment while I was away, but she swore them to secrecy.”

  A sob escaped her throat.

  “She told them they weren’t to do or say anything that would interrupt my year. I finally figured it out the day I was flying home.”

  “How?”

  “She hadn’t come to the phone in over a fortnight. She’d sent emails and little notes, but her handwriting had changed. Had become weak and scratchy. When she wouldn’t come to the phone to wish me a good flight I finally demanded that my brothers tell me. I wasn’t getting on that plane until I knew what was going on. They said she’d just been admitted to the local hospice.”

  Her green eyes shone with streams of tears but her voice sounded dull when she finally spoke.

  “I presume I don’t need to spell out why she was there.”

  He shoo
k his head, no, grateful that her mother had been given appropriate palliative care. He was astonished at the strength of a mother’s love.

  “That plane couldn’t move fast enough,” Maggie said. “It was the longest journey of my life.”

  “And when you arrived?” He already knew the answer, but he had to hear it from her.

  “She passed away three hours before I got here.” Maggie stared at him, strangely dry-eyed, as if something inside her had died all over again. “My brothers and my father had been with her the whole time. I was the only one who wasn’t there for the one person who had sacrificed so much for me to reach my dreams.”

  A sharp series of knocks sounded on the side of the car.

  “Dags! Let’s get a move on. Time to celebrate, birthday girl!”

  Maggie swooshed her sleeve across her eyes and rolled down her window with a huff. “Quit rushing me, you big drongo.”

  She gave her hair a bit of a princess shake and shooed her brother away with her fingers. A little-sister-in-charge-of-her-big-brother move that would have made him laugh if Raphael hadn’t known she was hurting so much inside.

  “It’s my birthday, I’ll come in when I’m ready.”

  “You all right, Maggie?”

  Raphael clocked Eddie’s use of his sister’s real name. Genuine concern. Family love.

  “Yeah. Fine. Just...you know...getting myself prepared to enter the hotel after who knows how long. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Raph? Are you not coming in to celebrate Maggie’s big three-oh?”

  This one was up to Maggie. He wasn’t going to prolong the torture if she didn’t want him there.

  “I don’t know.” She looked across at him, with nothing but questions and defiance written across her features. “Are you coming in?”

  This wasn’t a win-win situation. It was lose all the way. But leaving was the coward’s option and he didn’t want to be that guy anymore. The one who walked away when the going got tough.

  Don’t leave anything to chance.

  This time he’d see it through.

  “Of course, Maggie.”

  She held out the handkerchief towards him, then pulled it back. “I’ll wash it first.”