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 him 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.”