French Kiss

By stacy travis

It didn't take a medical degree to know that Josh Weitz was insanely hot, from his swoony grey-green eyes to his dark hair that begs my fingers to run through it. 

But he was my best friend, and I was too busy crushing on his roommate--otherwise known as the 'Wrong Guy'--to notice. 

Sure, Josh has always been there for me, and he makes me laugh like no one else can. But it's only when 'Wrong Guy' stands me up in Paris and Josh shows up for me, once again, that I start to appreciate all the things I've been missing. 

Like the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs, and how he always holds the door for me and the unexpected kiss we share under the Eiffel Tower. He makes me feel that spark I have always longed for. 

But trust doesn't come easy for me, and being with him is a risk.

Will I lose my best friend . . . or my heart?

A slow-burn, friends-to-lovers romance that will leave you breathless

• Language: English
• Publisher: stacy travis
• Release date: Oct 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393698197

stacy travis

Stacy Travis writes contemporary romance novels with strong female characters and the men who love them for their badassery.  She fuels her writing with coffee, pretzels, and prodigious amounts of cheese. When she's not on a deadline, she's in running shoes complaining that all roads seem to go uphill. Or on the couch with a margarita. Or fangirling at a soccer game.  Stacy lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two sons and a poorly-trained rescue dog who hoards socks.

Book preview

Prologue

July 10

Paris

---

"Those of you who know me well might call me a planner," I said, pausing to let the crowd enjoy a laugh at my expense. The pause was planned. I’m obsessive about controlling details, and I knew I’d need to catch my breath. I was a little nervous speaking in front of a crowd, but I reminded myself that these people had my back.

There is nothing I like better than a well-conceived agenda that takes me exactly where I want to go, according to an exact series of events. And today… I’m here to say that maybe I was wrong. Maybe life isn’t all about planning and looking for expected results. Maybe the great parts can’t be controlled like that. We have to just let them happen and go along for the ride.

No one was arguing with me. It’s possible that this group already knew something it took me years to learn. But I didn’t care. I was going to tell them my thoughts anyway.

I guess what I’m saying is that I get it now. It just took me a little longer than some people to figure it out. But I’m finally there. And in my defense, I was really, really tired for a long time. Med school and residency suck. So I’m just gonna blame that for my lack of common sense. And maybe a few other things.

A few people were nodding. They understood.

I just hoped It made sense to everyone else. So I continued with my story.

Sleep deprivation will drive a person to make decisions that are at best a bit reckless and at worst totally insane. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had any real sleep in almost a decade.

Working as a medical resident for the past three years, after a separate spate of sleepless years during med school, I’d learned that sleep was just a fantasy, something that existed in other people’s lives, not my own.

I also learned early on which of my fellow students could still function normally on five or six hours of sleep and which of us needed a full eight, which we never actually got. In a perfect world, I’d have been happy with nine hours per night, so the math was never going to work in my favor.

It would stand to reason that I’d choose a different field, one that allowed me to feel rested at least occasionally. But equal to my unmet desire to hit the snooze button a thousand times was my love of science.

I was not going to let a little sleep deficit stand in the way of doing what I wanted.

That’s how I found myself on a three-hour train ride from Amsterdam to Paris with the intention of meeting my insanely hot, insanely wrong-for-me fellow resident, Maddox, and having mind-blowing European sex in the City of Light.

In addition to the sleep issue, I had to lay the blame in poor judgment and my habit of wishful thinking. I could never entirely see the difference between what I wanted to be true and what actually was true. Especially when it came to Maddox. And his tight, hard abs.

To a driven premed student—and later, to an equally driven medical student—envisioning what I wanted and going after it with dogged determination was the only way to make it happen. I figured I could apply that to everything, even guys who’d broken other people’s hearts. I thought I could make it work with them, even if none of the two dozen women who’d come before me had tamed those bad boys. I’d be more captivating and more persuasive.

If I’d been thinking logically, I might not have gotten on that train in Amsterdam. My friends had cautioned me against it, and I hadn’t listened. I got in line to be number two-dozen-and-one.

Ah, Maddox.

Gorgeous, impeccably built, emotionally screwed-up Maddox.

I pictured exactly how our meet cute in Paris would go and how our decadent weekend would unfold after that. I could picture the cloudless sky. I’d see him waiting for me with that cocky, faux-innocent grin of his, like he knew how much time I’d spent thinking about seeing him shirtless. I’d trip over a wayward baguette, crash into him, and he’d tumble on his back, laughing.

You’re beautiful. Do you know that? Everyone here is looking at me and wondering how someone so gorgeous could ever be here with someone like me, he’d say.

I could almost smell the freshly baked croissants we’d nibble the next morning after losing ourselves in the kind of sex that people sang about in angry ballads. It would be the culmination of three years of glances and innuendos, his insinuations of, if only…, which had felt safe to say because he was always dating someone else.

That’s what I love about you, Hannah or Why are we never single at the same time? were the kinds of meaningless phrases that Maddox tossed around casually with me. He could flirt with abandon because we both knew nothing could ever happen.

But what if it could happen?

By June of our third year in residency, we’d finished our friendship tour of duty, and there were no more roadblocks. The blooming promise of romance propelled me. I wasn’t wrong about this. I’d done a thorough assessment. Scientific method. I’d been trained to think that way.

If I was being honest, I knew Josh would have an issue with my plan. Logical, level-headed, I-wish-I-found-him-attractive Josh. Honest enough to call bullshit when I moped and fretted that I’d never land a good job, and cynical enough to warn me that global warming might doom us all before I ever needed to land a job.

Josh knew I how much I loved and respected him. He was probably the one person in my life who had a completely clear view of the way things looked to an objective observer, even when he stood squarely in the middle of the drama. He could pull himself out long enough to give advice or point me in a better direction, often diametrically opposed to the one I was rushing toward, my heart in my hand and logic thrown to the wind.

Josh had been the first to warn me that a Paris rendezvous with Maddox was a terrible idea. After all, he lived with the guy, so he had a pretty good idea of what Maddox was capable of doing.

He’s the dumbest smart person I’ve ever met, Josh said more than once. He has perfect recall of everything we learned in med school, and he’ll never forget the dosage of some obscure pharmaceutical. But he has zero emotional intelligence and no tact. I feel sorry for the women he dates, Josh had said, never imagining that I’d want to be one of them.

I could done the wise thing. The problem was that I had no idea what that was when it came to Maddox. He had a way of blurring my vision. He was so dazzling, so muscular, so hot, so irresistible when he smiled… he made me dumb by association.

I watched him seduce women, date them, and break up with them for reasons that always seemed a little spurious. For over a year, I’d had a long-distance boyfriend who prevented me from ever really thinking of Maddox as anything but an entertaining source of stories about what not to do in relationships. And Maddox treated me far better than the women he dated because we were good friends.

If only you and I were single at the same time… he’d say, again.

If only.

Eventually, my long-distance relationship fizzled like most long-distance relationships do. Especially during the grueling residency years. I still never really considered dating Maddox because I told myself that what we shared as friends was better than that. I was someone he respected. I was a confidante.

I was lying.

And worse, I’d deluded myself into thinking that if we ever did date, he’d treat me better than all the rest. Plus, he was so damned good-looking. I’d figured I could just stare at him all day and nothing else would matter.

So I got on the train.

1

First Year Residents

July - Three Years Earlier

San Francisco

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It was hard not to notice the new guy. The moment he entered the dark pub on Haight Street, the atmosphere changed. His presence moved the room like a butterfly flapping its wings, sending a breeze across the sticky, lacquered four-tops and the dusty pool table whose felt had long ago worn thin.

Sitting on a barstool, I turned, and there he was, all six feet one of him, pecs and abs visible through his tight grey T-shirt, dirty-blond hair slicked back like he’d just showered after amazing sex. Even in his mid-twenties, he looked like a Division I college soccer star who played classical guitar and set the curve in all his premed classes.

Well, even if he hadn’t looked like all those things, I’d later discover he was all those things. He was also a mess. Emotionally, mentally, logically… a mess. And no one held it against him.

He was that kind of guy. A charmer.

Even the bartender who was sliding a coaster under my pint of beer stopped momentarily to take him in. Well, that guy looks like trouble.

Like the kind who’ll start a fight or something? I asked, figuring that’s the kind of trouble a bartender worried about.

Nah, the other kind of trouble. He’ll flirt with all my waitresses and no one’ll get shit done all night.

Ah, yeah, I know the type. Had my heart broken by a few too many of them.

Never again, right?

The bartender gave me a knowing nod like we were both too sensible to be fooled anymore, but if I was honest—that guy was exactly my type. The body, the face. I was a sucker for that kind of eye candy, and I’d dated more than a few guys like him in college, enough to know they were generally bad news, too impressed with the longing stares from other women to stay loyal for long. Every break up made me an emotional mess and derailed my studies until I could pick myself up and start again.

After four years of that same pattern, I finally got smart. I couldn’t afford to sideline myself during medical school, so I made a decision: no more gorgeous, distracting bad boys. I could daydream about them all I wanted, but I’d never date them. It had worked out beautifully and I graduated at the top of my class.

Continuing the trend, I’d saddled up with a safe, dependable, long-distance boyfriend a month before starting my residency program. He’d be just enough of a distraction over a few long weekends to keep me interested, but I could focus the rest of my energy on medicine and harmless daydreams about guys like the one who walked into the bar. It seemed like a failsafe plan.

From the doorway of the bar, the new guy’s eyes scanned the room and quickly moved past me. We didn’t know each other, I reminded myself, and I was just a single face in a crowd. There was no reason for him to smile at me or even acknowledge my existence. But that didn’t stop me from wishing for a smoldering, hungry stare, just to keep my self-esteem afloat.

Instead, the guy glanced around Michael Collins Irish Bar, a muscle in his jaw clenching, the tiniest indication that he wasn’t as sure of himself as his confident smile suggested. Those minuscule tells in seemingly perfect people reassured me that they were actually a tiny bit like me—far from perfect.

I’d never been a morning person, I ate sugary cereals and other useless carbs, I killed any plant that had the misfortune to be in my apartment, and I was endlessly hard on myself. I could recite the complete list of my flaws at will.

I could name a few of my good qualities if I had to. I never forgot birthdays, I didn’t freak out under pressure, and I never took my friendships for granted. I’d also made it through four years of medical school and gotten admitted to a top residency program in internal medicine, which meant I’d done something right in my academic life but also meant that everyone around me was a superstar.

And sometimes it felt exhausting to live among people whose flaws barely registered.

Maybe that was why I gathered them up and catalogued them in my memory for the times when I needed a reality check or a confidence boost. In other words, most of the time.

The life of a med student had been a nonstop barrage of learning curves, older doctors telling us how much we didn’t know, and endless memorization of medical facts, all of which I experienced on very little sleep. Residency was designed to break us down, make us feel dumb, and force us to build ourselves up again before we were sent out into the world to work as doctors.

After all, who wouldn’t want to know that the person anointed with the job of operating on a heart or diagnosing a life-changing disease had run the gauntlet, and survived?

For every moment I’d spent glued to a medical textbook, learning unalterable truths about human physiology, my mind had spent even more time spinning off into equally interesting romantic scenarios that would probably never happen, but there was always a chance.

I called it optimism. Other people called it delusion.

The debate over the most fitting catchall term was wasted on me. Some people watched movies or munched edibles. I imagined the possibility for toe-curling seduction even where there was none. I had enough reality in my daily life—sickness and worried families and the potential for disease to end in death.

It was no mystery why I’d come to rely on the chance appearance of a handsome face or a gym-honed body to make all my real-life concerns disappear. Those images gave me something to think about on a dark night before I fell asleep, pleasant ideas that might end up in my dreams. And in them, I was a quick-witted, captivating, beautiful version of myself.

In my waking life, I didn’t move with effortless grace and I didn’t care. My brown hair was long and wavy, but it was easier to throw it up in a knot or a high ponytail than worry about styling it. And I’d endured years of orthodontics so at least I felt confident my teeth were straight when I smiled. That was how I’d come to be at our neighborhood bar wearing jeans, a hoodie, and no makeup.

Who am I dressing up for? I’d asked my friend Heidi, who stopped by my apartment so we could walk together. We were about to start our medical residency at UC San Francisco Hospital, so it only seemed natural to have one last night of carefree fun before we got slammed with cases and pressure and stress. There was no way I was going to ruin it by worrying about whether my platform boots were on point or my layered necklaces were the right length.

Maybe you’ll meet the love of your life tonight, Heidi said.

I have a boyfriend, I reminded her, and she immediately laughed, which came out as a snort.

You have an excuse. A guy you’ve dated six times who lives three thousand miles away.

He could turn into the love of my life. We agreed to try.

He sounds safe and boring. That doesn’t sound like the love of anyone’s life, and I think you could do better, she said, looking me over again. Then she shook her head. But not looking like that.

If he’s really the right guy, he’ll love me anyway. Before she could answer, I walked past her and started down the stairs.

He might not know he’s the right guy because you look like a homeless person, she called after me.

Whatever.

I didn’t entirely discount the idea that true love could be found over a pint of Guinness, but I clung to the idea that anyone who really understood me would appreciate the carefree way that I bucked convention. Or maybe I was justifying being too lazy to bother with mascara.

I’m casting off the social construct that says I need to make myself look prettier in public, I said when Heidi caught up to me.

That’s a lovely, bohemian thought, she said. I just find that when I dress like I’m studying for finals, I get fucking depressed.

At least I’m not in sweatpants.

Bar. Too. Low.

I. Don’t. Care.

Hannah, I love you, but you’re destroying your chance at happiness with that hoodie.

If only happiness were so easy to control, I said, stuffing my hands into the pocket of my hoodie and heading down the block.

Heidi and I had met when a mutual friend found out we’d both be residents in San Francisco and insisted that we get in touch. Or meet for dinner. Or look for an apartment together. By the time Heidi and I did finally meet, we felt a little like we were on a blind date arranged by meddling relatives.

At first glance, I assumed we had nothing in common other than our interest in the large field of medicine. She looked like an Asian badass with a tattoo on the back of her neck, a pierced cheek and lower lip, and short spiky hair with a white streak along the off-center part.

Next to me, a rule-follower from Minnesota whose biggest transgression was getting my ears pierced without asking my parents, Heidi looked like a gang member who could probably kill me with her stare. Instead, she turned out to be one of the most insightful, sensitive, kind people I’d ever met, and I quickly chastised myself for typecasting her based on looks.

Unlike my quiet upbringing as an only child, Heidi’s was a tangle of shouting and kitchen wars in a huge family—she was the youngest of five sisters and two brothers, and her Korean grandparents had moved to Indiana from Seoul to help her parents raise the kids.

We basically had four parents, which worked out well because we were kind of a handful, especially me. Within the first hour of meeting, Heidi had shown me her four tattoos—all of them different spider breeds—mentioned getting engaged and then calling it off before age sixteen, and told me about how she’d been arrested for stealing a car. That ended the engagement, by the way.

Since her teen years, she’d settled down, but only a little. I still have a wild streak, and it needs to be met, she said, as if that wasn’t clear by her camo-print faux-fur jacket, her nose piercing, and her tendency to use the word fuck for emphasis. So if I’m in a stable relationship or a stable work situation, I need to rebel in some other fucking way.

I considered academia and residency to be pretty stable, not to mention that Heidi had been dating her boyfriend, Karim, since early in medical school. I couldn’t imagine what kind of rebellion Heidi had planned for the other areas of her life as a result. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of it.

Or maybe I did. Maybe Heidi was just the kind of person I needed to befriend, since my own rebellious streak started and ended with going to a bar without any makeup.

We’d been tight ever since.

2

Blue Eyes

July – Later That Night

San Francisco

---

The new guy didn’t stray far from stereotype. I could tell by the way he high-fived a group of guys and ogled the cocktail waitress that his ideal night would include multiple toasts with his bros and a hookup if all went according to plan. Looking beyond my baggy hoodie to divine my true spirit didn’t enter the picture.

He did eventually talk to me, but only because he was trying to buy a round of drinks from the bartender, and I was in his way. Standing with my back to the bar, I was lost in conversation with Karim, who was telling me about how his parents immigrated from Senegal and raised their three Muslim kids in a neighborhood that was predominantly Jewish.

They figured we'd be less persecuted in a sea of persecuted people. Safety in numbers.

Logic in that, I said. My upbringing felt so vanilla compared with his. His family had moved to Paris, then Canada, and had finally ended up in Washington, DC when he was sixteen.

They’re logical but still crazy, he said in his lilting accent.

Excuse me, can I get in? someone with a deep voice said, pushing an elbow next to my ear and coming dangerously close to taking me out.

I looked to see who was asking me to move, annoyed by pushy guys who rose a head taller than me and didn’t really need to do much to get a female bartender’s attention.

The pale-blue eyes hit me first. Clear and bright, they seemed to see something other people couldn’t, even though my earliest biology classes had taught me that eye color had nothing to do with seeing. They actually sparkled. I couldn’t look away.

Then I understood what people meant when they described someone as having a chiseled face. His cheekbones and jawline looked like they had been worked from marble by an Italian master. His strong shoulders and biceps looked even more magnificent when they flexed as he reached for his drink. He was just as jaw-droppingly gorgeous up close as when he’d walked through the door. As he