Free It Takes Two to Tangle by Theresa Romain Page A

ramshackle letter K . “Is your own writing clear, Frances? Is it possible to learn to write well with the hand that feels wrong?”
    â€œYes, with enough practice. Probably you won’t even have to be slapped across the hand, since you have a more pleasant incentive.” That was one way of describing Caroline.
    â€œWill you show me?” His blue eyes looked deep into hers. “I want to know this will work.”
    A simple enough request, but Frances understood what it meant. Every day, she realized, he must encounter something that had changed because of his injury. Losing an arm meant losing so much more: independence, comfort, even the easy courtesy of one’s acquaintances, as they had seen yesterday.
    Frances knew this well, for she had once lost too. Not a limb, but a whole person. A whole family. The finest part of herself.
    Oh, she knew the sick dullness of loss. And anything she could help Henry gain, she would, even if it earned her nothing but his gratitude.
    â€œAll right,” Frances agreed. “I’ll write something.”
    She selected a quill, dipped it in the ink, then wiped the nib. She drew each letter deliberately, rounding it into a perfect feminine copperplate, loops and vowels as open as the model script in a writing primer. Bearing no resemblance to the writing in the letter she’d sent.
    HENRY IS TOO DEMANDING.
    He laughed. “I see there’s nothing wrong with your handwriting at all.”
    Frances sanded the letters as carefully as she would an invitation for the queen, then set the paper aside. “As I said. You couldn’t believe me without seeing it for yourself, could you? Is that because you’re a solider or an artist?”
    He narrowed his eyes, the look she now knew meant he was collecting details. “I’ve always been that way, so maybe it is an artist’s curse. But I am curious, why do you speak so readily about soldiering? You seem to understand the life as many women do not.”
    His words startled Frances, silencing her for a too-long moment. No one had asked her about her past since she’d come to London with Caroline. It was scarred over, but not truly healed. Most wounds she had unwittingly inflicted herself.
    She mustered a reply. “Yes. My late husband, Charles, was a soldier. He died during the siege of Walcheren.” A quagmire. Pointless.
    â€œI am sorry for your loss,” Henry said.
    â€œYou need not be. It was almost six years ago; I’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with it.”
    This was quite true. Nearly six years was enough time to stop missing the man himself, whom she had long since grown past in years. Charles had died at twenty-two, and Frances would be thirty in a few more months.
    â€œHe must have been a marvelous man to deserve you,” Henry said. He really did have fine manners.
    â€œHe was far too handsome for me,” Frances murmured, “but I was more than willing to allow the imbalance.”
    Her eyes flicked over Henry’s face—hair like morning sun, eyes like afternoon sky. He resembled night-tinted Charles not at all, except that both were far too handsome for her.
    Charles’s face had not been the only imbalance in their marriage. For Charles, Frances had tipped so far from her center, she hadn’t righted herself for years. In some ways, she still hadn’t. But she’d found a new equilibrium instead.
    Or had, until Henry started studying her with those clear eyes of his, making her think of rolling over again. She knew from long months of watching the ton just how many secrets people betrayed without realizing.
    She wondered what Henry saw in her now.
    â€œAfter Charles died,” Frances said, tugging her eyes down to the safety of the paper on which Henry had been writing. ABCDEFGHIJK . Blot. “I used to look over everything I had of his every day: a sketch of him, some letters. But I have not needed to for a very