‘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 âne.’ Christophe was running his hands over the donkey, feeling for any abnormalities and looking for any obvious injuries.
‘Âne,’ 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 ânesse.’
‘Are they allânesseshere?’
‘Most of them. The others are… how do you say… fixed?’
‘Gelded.’
‘Si. Some ofles ânessesareenceinte– 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 andune ânessecan beenceintefor 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 thesangliers.’
‘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!…thathair. 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 sweetmarron– 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.
