Only Frances and Johnathan, moving together as if they always had.
As if they always would.
They returned to the inn well past midnight.
The fire in the common room had burned low, casting long shadows across the stone hearth and wooden floor. The world outside had gone still again, the kind of stillness that soothed the soul.
Johnathan opened the door to their room for her, and Frances stepped inside. She did not hesitate. She did not look back.
There were no expectations between them. No assumptions.
Only truth.
She sat at the edge of the bed and removed her shoes, watching the pale moonlight spill across the quilt. The blue ribbon had come loose. Her hair, once carefully brushed, had tangled again from the dancing.
Johnathan crossed the room and knelt in front of her.
She did not speak as he took her hands gently in his.
“Frances,” he said, voice rough from emotion, “whatever happens next… whatever decision you make about tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after that… I want you to know something.”
She nodded for him to continue.
“I would walk through fire for you. But I would also wait. For as long as it takes.”
Tears stung her eyes, yet she smiled through them. “You are not the man they say you are.”
“No,” he said. “Not when it comes to you.”
She leaned forward, resting her forehead against his.
He kissed her—slowly, sweetly.
Not to possess. Not to convince.
Just to be close.
They lay together afterward in the quiet hush of the inn, fully clothed and wrapped in woolen blankets, the tips of their fingers tangled between them on the mattress.
Sleep came slowly, but peacefully.
Frances drifted with her head against his chest, the rhythm of his breathing guiding her into dreams.
She dreamed of nothing extravagant.
Only of laughter, and summer wind, and a hand in hers beneath starlight.
The next morning, Frances awoke with the birdsong.
The hamlet was already stirring—someone drew water from the well, a door creaked open across the green, and a child’s delighted squeal echoed through the air.
She sat up and turned to find Johnathan still asleep, hair tousled, one arm outstretched where she had lain.
For a long moment, she watched him.
She remembered all the versions of him she had known—the mischievous boy with scraped knees, the wounded young man who fled London, the brooding rogue who had burst into a church to steal her away, and now this one. The one who held her gently in the night and said nothing of his own pain until she asked.
All of them were real.
