Franz didn’t say much on the ride home, one hand loose on the wheel, his jaw set the entire way. Arianne let him keep the silence, watching the estate come into view instead of pushing him to explain what she already suspected.
The moment the front door opened, Lexx’s babbling carried down the hall before either of them had taken off their coats, Aunt Estella’s laugh following a beat behind it. He caught sight of Arianne first, both arms shooting up from where Aunt Estella held him on her hip, a frustrated whine building the second his own arms couldn’t close the distance fast enough on their own.
"Somebody’s happy you’re both home early," Aunt Estella said, handing him over without being asked. "He’s been fussing at the window for the last twenty minutes like he could hear the car before it turned in."
Arianne settled him against her chest, and Lexx immediately latched onto the collar of her blouse, working the top button between two fingers with the same single-minded focus he gave everything lately. Eight months old now, heavier than he’d been even a few weeks ago, his face settling more each day into some mix of Franz’s jaw and her own eyes, though nobody had decided yet which side he favored more.
She’d run a company before she’d turned thirty. She’d sat across boardroom tables from men twice her age and made them wait for her answer instead of the other way around. None of that had prepared her for this, for a person this small deciding, apparently on his own authority, that she belonged to him.
Lexx patted her cheek twice, unimpressed that her attention had drifted somewhere he couldn’t follow it.
"I’m here." She kissed his cheek in answer, and he let out a squeal loud enough that Aunt Estella laughed again from the hallway.
Franz went to change out of his suit, and Arianne carried Lexx up to the nursery herself, setting him down on the play mat with the stuffed lion Leo had picked out for him. Lexx went straight for the tag sewn into its ear, one fist braced against the mat while he gummed it with both cheeks working, and shrieked with laughter every time she pulled it gently out of reach and let him win it back. He tried pulling himself up against the low table twice, made it halfway both times, and gave up in favor of pushing a set of stacking cups across the floor instead, more interested in scattering them than stacking anything.
She fed him once he’d tired himself out, spooned mashed carrots into a mouth that opened eagerly for the first four bites and clamped shut in protest by the fifth, and carried him to his crib once he’d gone fully limp against her shoulder, one fist still curled around a corner of his blanket. The nursery sat in the east wing, tucked between the twins’ rooms and her own reading room, the side of the house that had become hers over the years without anyone deciding it on purpose.
Franz’s study was clear on the other side of the house, and she found him there with the door open, papers spread across his desk in no order she recognized, most of them unread as far as she could tell. He hadn’t turned on the second lamp.
"What’s wrong?"
He looked up like he hadn’t heard her cross the room, and didn’t answer right away. Instead he reached for her hand, pulled her down onto his lap, and pressed his face into the curve of her shoulder, one arm wrapping fully around her back.
She let him stay there. Three years married and a son between them, and he reached for her like this anyway, like something might take her out of the room if he didn’t hold on. She’d expected that to fade once Lexx arrived, expected his attention to redirect the way she’d seen it happen to other men. It hadn’t. If anything it had gotten worse, or better, depending on which of them was asked.
"Talk to me." She ran a hand along the back of his neck.
"I don’t like not knowing what he wants." His voice came out muffled against her shoulder. "Rafael. Two hours in a room with you and he didn’t give you an actual answer. I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to work out what that means, and I keep landing somewhere I don’t like."
"You’re allowed to worry. I’d worry too, if the positions were reversed."
"I know you would." He lifted his head enough to look at her. "I’m not angry. I’m not trying to be the husband who can’t handle his wife having a private conversation with another man. I just don’t like this particular one."
"Because you don’t know what he wants yet."
"Because I don’t know what he wants yet," Franz agreed. "A man doesn’t spend three years photographing someone and then ask for one conversation and walk away satisfied with it. Whatever this is, it isn’t finished. I keep running through what I’d do in his position, and none of the answers I come up with sit right with me."
"Then we wait and see what he does next, the same way we’ve done with everything else." She tucked a strand of hair back from his face. "You don’t have to solve it tonight, sitting alone in the dark with a desk full of papers you haven’t even read."
Franz let out a breath that came close to a laugh, some of the weight leaving his shoulders for the first time since she’d found him there.
"Are you jealous?" she asked, watching his face for the answer before he gave it.
"No." He said it fast enough that she almost believed the confidence behind it, his mouth curving despite the tension sitting behind his eyes. "I’m not worried you’ll want him. I’ve seen what you do to men who disappoint you. Rafael would last about a week before he figured out he never had a chance."
"That’s very sure of yourself."
"I’m sure of you." He caught her hand before she could pull it back, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. "I’ve watched you turn down better men than him for less interesting reasons. I don’t lose sleep wondering if you’ll love someone else. I lose sleep wondering what he’s planning to do about the fact that he can’t have you."
She leaned in and kissed the tip of his nose, the gesture only half meant to tease him out of the mood he’d been sitting in for the last hour. "You’re unbearably vain, you know that?"
"I’m allowed to be vain about exactly one thing." His hand slid up along her thigh under the hem of her skirt, unhurried, his grin returning now that the worst of the conversation had passed. "You should get used to it. I plan on being vain about you for a very long time."
He didn’t wait for an answer to that either. He kissed her instead, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her neck, and whatever was left of Rafael Summers in the room disappeared somewhere neither of them bothered chasing.