Frances scowled. “You look like a man who needs stitching and a week’s rest with a physician and a decent brandy.” Her gaze moved to his shoulder.
“With you?” He offered a roguish grin.
“That depends on whether you let me bandage that wound. I hear I am quite handy with a needle.”
Johnathan chuckled. “It looks worse than it is. The bullet merely grazed me. Stitches are not necessary.”
William cleared his throat. “Maximilian and I will prevent Cranford should he attempt to follow. We will assure you have at least a half-day head start if you ride now.”
“Indeed,” Maximilian said, “Though I daresay Cranford will not wish to show his face anytime soon.”
“Thank you,” Johnathan said, turning to his old friends.
William gave a faint smile. “You will forgive me one day.”
“I just did,” Johnathan said.
Frances squeezed his hand. “Come on. We have a wedding to reach.”
They rode toward Gretna at a steady pace, stopping briefly to tend Johnathan’s wound, then following the main roads. Frances kept stealing glances at him—at the way he sat a little too stiffly in the saddle, at the pale sheen on his face—but he never complained.
She did not speak either.
They did not need to.
When Gretna Green came into view at last—a crooked sign, a squat stone building, the unmistakable clang of metal striking an anvil—Frances felt her throat tighten.
They dismounted slowly, hand in hand.
The blacksmith, a broad-shouldered Scot with a sooty grin and a pipe tucked behind one ear, looked up from his work.
“Ye are here for a wedding, are ye?” he asked.
“We are,” Johnathan said, smiling through the pain in his voice.
The man set aside his hammer. “Ye’ve got the look of it.”
Frances laughed then—a bright, bubbling sound that caught even her by surprise, spilling out as her shoulders relaxed.
The ceremony was simple—Frances’s fingers trembled slightly as she took Johnathan’s hands, and his voice cracked once before he steadied it.
No society, no pomp—just two souls casting off the weight of expectation, free to choose one another. Only Johnathan and Francis, standing in a warm circle of sunlight inside the forge, the anvil gleaming between them.
“I, Johnathan Seton,” he said, voice steady despite the tremble in his limbs, “take you, Frances Rowley, as my wife. My equal. My future.”
She bit her lip, blinking back tears. “And I take you, scandal and all. For the rest of my days.”
They kissed, and the blacksmith clapped his soot-streaked hands with a grin.
“Now that is a match made in fire.”
That night, they returned to the quiet inn nestled just beyond the Scottish border—a place of soot-smeared shutters and creaky floorboards, where the warmth of memory lingered like smoke in the rafters. The same kind of room as before. The same narrow bed. The same flickering fire.
But everything was different.
Frances stood before the hearth, hair down, cloak gone, watching him with a smile that could undo a kingdom.
He sat on the bed, his shirt open to reveal the bandaged wound on his shoulder, his gaze never leaving hers.
