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Franny

Franny watched her husband, his head rocking against the squabs in rhythm with the carriage. He was quiet. Had been silent for the first hour of their journey to London. He wasn’t with her, his mind gone somewhere far from the interior of the conveyance.

Bloody hell. What a disaster yesterday had been. Not a surprise that the minute that witch showed up, everything went up in flames. Franny had moved past it already, though. Her ire, her heartbreak, had been over Rupert falling back under that odious woman’s spell. But he hadn’t. Puppet Perty had broken free, taken a knife and severed his own strings.

His face spasmed, tension rippling over it before it went eerily calm again. And Franny’s heart was broken for a whole different reason now. Because as much as she had always seen the evil that woman perpetuated…Rupert hadn’t. Severing his strings? He’d cut into his flesh to do so. Open wounds that were still bleeding.

Franny had known from a very young age that her own father— The Earl —had been a bad man. She may have believed him her father for the first twenty of her years, but that had always been a formality. He had never been a father to her. The disdain he’d held for her was as palpable as the back of his hand. Franny’d had nothing to lose.

But Rupert’s mother? She’d made Rupert believe she loved him. She’d fooled him into loving her. She had betrayed her son in the worst way imaginable. Fury sizzled underneath Franny’s skin. She’d never hated a person more.

“Do you want to discuss it?” she asked softly.

He shook his head silently. Same response as last night. But his nostrils flared. His mouth whitened where it pressed the tiniest bit tighter.

Her heart twisted painfully. He was hurting so deeply. She couldn’t imagine the devastation that came with the discovery that someone he loved—someone he believed loved him, who was meant to protect and care for him above all else—actually didn’t care for him at all. A villain who only saw him as a tool to serve their own ends.

And quite literally tried to destroy what was important to him.

“What’s going to happen, Rupert?”

His stare flicked to hers, rich brown eyes flaring with some turbulent emotion. Whatever it was, Franny didn’t want to stand in its way.

“I don’t know, Franny. But no matter what, we’ll get through this. If this annulment somehow goes through, I’ll marry you again if I bloody have to. You will be my wife until the end of our days. Nothing will change that.”

Ah. Resolve. Her lips curved up in a half-smile. “My, how much things have changed in three short weeks.”

The smile that greeted her was sad. Damn that blasted woman! Her muscles twitched with the desire to go to him. Comfort him.

He melted into the seat on a heavy sigh. “First, I need to meet with my solicitor. See what I can make of this mess. I’m not sure if the petition can be withdrawn. And I cannot admit to what my…” He cut off and swallowed hard. And when he spoke again, tears pricked at Franny’s vision. “What that woman did.”

She cleared her throat, pushed away the hurt she felt on her husband’s behalf. She needed to be strong for him. For them. “Do you believe you can trust your solicitor, or…?”

He lifted a shoulder. “I’m honestly not sure who I can trust anymore.” He let his shoulder drop. “Except for you,” he added quietly.

She couldn’t hold back any longer. She gathered her skirts and flopped, rather inelegantly considering her injured ankle, onto his side of the carriage. He immediately lifted his arm and drew her into his side, and then his arm latched around her, tight, grasping, desperate. He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled deeply. Her lips twitched. Her husband seemed to quite enjoy smelling her. It was a tad comical, but also…thrilling. She shivered.

There was something primal about it, about the way he touched her, even now. His actions screamed of a claiming. Mine . She liked being somebody’s. After having been nobody’s for so long. After nobody wanting her to be theirs. Her body softened into his. And she was very happy that that somebody…was Rupert. She didn’t want to be anybody’s but his.

“You have always pushed me to think about what I truly want. Who I truly am,” he murmured into her hair. “It’s like you saw me through the layers of artifice she’d woven around me all these years. Where she had buried me.”

“I suppose it was fortunate then that I loved tormenting you so much when we were children. I was granted glimpses of who you were beneath the layers, before they were woven so tightly you couldn’t be seen at all. I knew to go digging.”

His lips curved against her head. “You always did have a penchant for digging in the mud.”

“How fitting, love, since you are so very much a stick in the mud.”

He chuckled, the soft laughter brushing over her cheek as he tilted her face toward his. And when his eyes met hers, she swore his burnt whisky irises smiled back at her. He cupped her cheek and ran the pad of his thumb leisurely over her cheekbone.

Rupert’s gaze grew solemn, dark. “There will be scandal, Franny. I know my mother. Whatever seeds she has planted… She’ll have painted you in the worst light imaginable.” He paused, and his eyes fell shut briefly, his jaw ticking. “But I’ll be by your side through it all. Making it clear that all that matters to me is you.”

Franny leaned forward and dusted her nose against his. “Oh, Rupert. You silly, silly man. Have you learned nothing about me these past three weeks?”

He pulled back and cocked a brow.

“Darling. I love nothing more than scandal.”