Fourteen months after the death of his beloved wife Beth, Duane “Dog The Bounty Hunter” Chapman has found love again with his fiancé Francie Frane. Now, the two are speaking out to talk about their “miracle” love story.

Frane explained to Entertainment Tonight that she lost her husband Bob to cancer six months before Beth died. In the end, it was their mutual losses that brought them together, as Dog and Frane could understand what the other was going through.

“We understood the pain that the other one was feeling and [in] those tough days and moments, we helped each other stand up,” Frane explained. “We could cry with each other and talk about what we were feeling. We were able to walk alongside each other through the pain and heartbreak and it brought us together in this amazing way.”

After meeting through a mutual friend, Dog asked Frane out, and he said that he “knew right away this was love” as they bonded through their grief.

Though Dog wasted no time in proposing, they are still trying to figure out a wedding date. While they are very much in love, they are each still grieving their loved ones. They made sure to honor December 30, the anniversary of Bob’s death. On June 26, the date Beth passed away, Dog brought Frane and his children to the Platte River in Colorado, where his late wife loved to go tubing every Father’s Day.

“We honor those dates and we don’t feel guilty, but it’s kind of strange,” Dog admitted. “But we’re in love and I say all the time, ‘Beth, I’m glad you provided me with Francie because that wasn’t on my list.’”

“We’re both still grieving,” Frane added. “We’re never going to leave Bob and Beth behind [or] forget about them. They’ll always be a part of us. We thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives with them and that’s not what happened and we were dealt a really hard hand. Both of us had a decision to make – are we going to rise up from the ashes and get back to life and what Beth and Bob would have wanted from us?”

As for those who think he moved on too fast from Beth, Dog said he was “dying of a broken heart” after her passing, and that he only felt alive again when he met Frane. His fiancé chimed in to say that she understands if fans of “Dog The Bounty Hunter have dubious feelings about their romance.

“Duane and Beth built a legacy with the shows and she has – in her own right, outside of Duane – thousands of fans [who] genuinely love her,” she said. “So, I do understand the, ‘How could you do this so quickly?’ We didn’t expect this either. My son thought I was going to run off and be a missionary in Africa just not to deal with life without Bob anymore. Neither one of us were expecting what happened, but God brought us together and how it fell into place was a miracle.”

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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