Page 13 of The Magic of Provence (A Year in France #3)

She put them back into her pocket and watched Christophe as he set down and opened his backpack and then used a stick to push the electric wire of the enclosure down far enough to step over it easily, a couple of halters and lead ropes in his hands.

He offered the back of a hand for the closest donkey to sniff and Fi could see the way the other donkeys edged closer, curious and friendly.

She liked the way Christophe showed the first donkey, a little grey jenny, the halter before he slowly put it on her.

‘You know me, don’t you cara ?’ he said softly. ‘We are amici , oui ?’

What would it be like, Fi wondered, for it to be normal to have so many words to choose from?

‘How many languages do you speak?’ she asked.

‘I grew up speaking both French and Italian. My mother speaks English very well and I learned more at school and singing pop music. I missed Julien when he went to boarding school in England, so I did my first year of university there with him before I started to become a vet. I also speak some Spanish and Portuguese.’

‘Wow… that’s amazing.’

‘Not so much.’ He shrugged off the compliment, leading the donkey towards a young tree that had a trunk thin enough to loop the rope around.

‘If you learn more than one language when you first start to speak, it becomes easier to learn more. And mine are all part of the family of Romance languages that come from Latin. Apart from English.’

‘Hmm… English is not a very romantic language,’ Fi agreed. ‘French is the official language of love, isn’t it?’

Christophe laughed and the sound made her own lips curve into something close to a grin. What could have become an embarrassing thing to have said was simply amusing.

‘It’s about the grammar, not the words of love,’ he said. ‘But yes, both French and Italian can be very romantic. Now…’ He picked up the stick that he’d used to lower the electric wire and pushed it down even further this time. ‘Do come in,’ he invited.

Fi put her apron on and set out her tools near the tree as Christophe caught and tied up a second donkey to a tree near the water trough. Then they both went to the little grey jenny.

‘How do you say donkey in French?’ Fi asked. ‘I heard the word at Lili’s party but I’ve forgotten.’

‘ C’est un ane .’ Christophe was running his hands over the donkey, feeling for any abnormalities and looking for any obvious injuries.

‘ ?ne ,’ Fi repeated. She’d remember that this time. Anne would make a rather nice name for a girl donkey. Like Jenny did in English. Or were they called something different here? ‘What if it’s a jenny?’ she asked. ‘Female?’

‘ Une anesse .’

‘Are they all anesses here?’

‘Most of them. The others are… how do you say… fixed?’

‘Gelded.’

‘ Si . Some of les anesses are enceinte – pregnant. Like this little one.’ Christophe leaned over the donkey’s back and had his hands on either side of a swollen abdomen.

‘I can’t tell how far along she is and une anesse can be enceinte for more than a year, but I will try and find out when the conception happened.

We’ll need her out of the forest before she has her baby.

It could be in danger from the sangliers . ’

‘ Sangliers ?’

‘Wild pigs.’ Christophe picked up a stethoscope and placed it on the donkey’s chest. He held the disc with one hand, his other hand on her neck, and Fi was sure that he wasn’t even aware that he was reassuring her with the rub of his thumb, because he was focussing on what he was listening to and what it was telling him about the function of the heart and lungs.

He took her temperature after that, used a small torch to check her eyes and wiped out her ears with a gauze pad, presumably to check for mites or excess wax.

Fi was holding the halter as Christophe worked through a thorough checklist and recorded his findings in a notebook.

She tickled the jenny’s ears and muzzle gently and spoke quietly to her, earning her trust before it was time to start working on her hooves, but that didn’t distract her from watching the examination.

Or, rather, watching Christophe’s hands.

They were as beautiful as his face, large enough to be in proportion to his height but with the delicate long fingers of a musician and the deft, precise movements of a surgeon.

His touch was gentle but sure and Fi could sense both his confidence and the wealth of experience and intelligence that underpinned it.

It was mesmerising to watch.

Until Fi realised that she was so caught up in the moment, she could actually imagine what the donkey was feeling.

Tiny goosebumps prickled on her arms as she could have sworn she felt the brush of Christophe’s fingers on her skin.

It was just as well that Christophe chose that moment to declare the first donkey to be in good health, gave her a dose of worming paste and moved on to the second donkey.

It was time for Fi to start her part of this work, and those goosebumps were long gone by the time she began trimming the first set of a rather daunting number of donkey pedicures.

* * *

Christophe Brabant had been captivated by Fiona Gilchrist from the first moment he’d seen her at Lili’s birthday party, but that had been, to start with, only because of how incredibly beautiful this woman was.

She could have stepped straight from a Titian canvas with that porcelain skin, the softness of those enticing curves and…

Dio mio ! … that hair . All the Gilchrist girls were stunning, with their fiery hair, but Fiona’s was by far the most mesmerising – the shade of the polished skin of a sweet marron – dark enough to hide the flicker of flames until it was touched by light, especially from the sun.

He had felt the heat from that colour kindle a spark somewhere very deep in his own body, and the urge to touch one of those curls – to stretch it out and watch it bounce back into the shape it was determined to be – had been surprisingly powerful.

Until he got close enough to make eye contact, that was. When he’d sensed something that was, to be honest, a little shocking.

Because it felt remarkably like fear.

His response had been instinctive. He knew about fear, on both personal and professional levels, and he’d worked with enough frightened animals in his time to know how to soften his body language and step back physically and metaphorically, far enough to be reassuring.

He’d also seen the way the tension around Fiona seemed to fade to being imperceptible when she’d been distracted by catching sight of Heidi, and he could actually feel the pull she had to go and be close enough to touch his beloved dog.

He’d recognised that, too. How many people had he already seen in his time as a vet who, for whatever reason, preferred the company of animals to that of people?

He got that.

He trusted his dog far more than most people, especially when it came to loyalty. Or love.

Why Fiona might be one of those people was a little sad but it was also… intriguing.

Different.

So was her career. He had never met a woman who had chosen such a physically demanding and potentially dangerous way to earn a living.

She was good at it, too. Very good. It was easy to take frequent glances at what Fi was doing without her realising that he was watching her – when he was slowly running his hands down a donkey’s legs, for instance, checking for inflammation in joints that might suggest arthritis, or standing still with the disc of his stethoscope between the last rib and a back leg so that he could listen for normal sounds of digestion.

He liked the way she treated the animals and he could see the trust she was earning with her gentle but confident manner.

Heidi had liked her instantly, as well, and that said a lot about what Fi was like as a person.

Animals could sense far more than most humans.

He really liked the care she was taking to get each hoof shaped as perfectly as possible, too, and he knew that wasn’t always easy.

Some of these forest donkeys had been rescued from unfortunate situations to join the herds, and in some cases the lack of attention to their feet had left their hooves in very poor condition, but he’d never seen anything as bad as he did when he got close enough to the new arrival in the herd, a halter in his hand, and could see the gelding’s feet.

Those hooves curled up like an exaggerated pair of Aladdin’s slippers.

Was this why the little donkey was standing so still away from the group?

Was it too hard for him to walk at all? Where would you even start to try and fix them?

‘Fiona?’ he called softly. ‘Could you come here, please?’

She was just as horrified as he was when she saw the state of this donkey’s feet.

‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered. ‘You poor wee thing…’ She reached out to touch the donkey but it shied and then stumbled to try and avoid her hand.

The donkey tried to avoid Christophe as well, but the stony ground made it lose balance and it was Christophe’s body that prevented a possible fall. He wrapped his arms around the neck to support the animal.

‘ Piano … piano …’ he murmured. ‘ Doucement … we are not going to hurt you, caro …’

He kept talking, just holding the frightened animal, his heart breaking a little to think of what might have happened in the past to create fear like this.

When he looked up, he wasn’t surprised to see Fi blinking as if she was trying not to shed tears.

Just a heartbeat of eye contact was enough for that connection to feel very real.

She had a big heart, this woman. She was capable of caring – loving – without limits.

Too much? Had she – like he had himself – given far too much, to the wrong person, perhaps, and been badly hurt?

Some things, once they were broken, could never be the same again, could they?

Like trust.

And hearts.