Page 25 of Two Rogues Make a Right
Will sucked in a breath. They didn’t really talk about that. Will didn’t talk about it with anybody. The events had been reported in the papers. The facts were there for anybody who wanted to know. No need for Will to have to think about it more than he already did.
“As far as this medicine,” Martin went on. “Laudanum helps me sleep but it gives me nightmares. However, it does make me cough less and sometimes that’s worth it. If I ever need it, you have my permission to do what it takes to get it. But perhaps give it to Mrs. Tanner to keep.”
“I don’t need to be babied.”
“It’s not about need, is it? It’s about being comfortable in our home. I know you won’t let the doctor do things I don’t want, and you know you don’t have to think about opium any more than you already do. That seems fair, doesn’t it? It’s just taking care of one another.”
Will was aware that if it hadn’t been for the fever, Martin wouldn’t be speaking half so freely. He crossed the room and kissed the top of Martin’s head. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”
“If you can be stupid for me, then I can be stupid for you.”
“You’re stupid no matter what you do,” Will said, trying very hard to sound like he wasn’t about to cry.
Chapter Ten
“Mr. Sedgwick! You’ve been fiddling with that spar for five minutes!” Mrs. Tanner called from the ground. “Have you gone daft?”
Slightly, Will thought. His mind had been in a muddle all day. “Sorry, Mrs. Tanner.” He gave the spar—the hazel sticks that held the bunches of straw in place—a final check and moved on to the next part of the roof that needed patching.
The Tanners’ cottage was in a state of dilapidation that spoke to years of repairs that had been put off and parts that had been too pricey to purchase. It was a state Will knew well from his own childhood home: the Grange was always leaking from someplace or another, the fences always had a gap through which animals got in or out, and the chimneys smoked no matter the weather. The adults of the Grange hadn’t been practically minded people; perhaps it was difficult to think about poetry and broken pump handles at the same time. Except—nobody would accuse Will of being a practical person. He was the coauthor of a play that he was fairly certain critics would dismiss as a trifling piece of nonsense. But he knew how to stop a leak, how to fix a creaky hinge, how to do all the other things that made a place safe and comfortable for the people who lived there. The difference was that Will gave a damn about the safety and comfort of the people in his care.
Will thought back to his rooms in London. There had been a fungus growing out of the windowsill and not a single uncracked windowpane. He had one decent shirt and forgot to eat more days than he remembered. He might know how to do a good many practical things, but he wasn’t likely to bestir himself to do them on his own behalf. All the work he had done on the cottage and at Mrs. Tanner’s had been for Martin. Broken fences and runaway pigs were solvable problems and gave him something to show for his labors. Left up to his own devices he dwelt on all the things that couldn’t be fixed.
“God help you and save you, Mr. Sedgwick,” Mrs. Tanner called. “Get down from there before you fall. You’re off with the fairies. I ought to tie you to my apron strings.”
“Woolgathering,” Will said sheepishly. “I’m not going to fall, though.” He was pretty sure that after his years at sea, he couldn’t fall off anything even if he tried. “There’s one more spot that needs work, so pass up that last bundle, if you please.”
“If you say so,” said Mrs. Tanner, hefting the bundle of straw and passing it to where Will stood at the top of the ladder. “But I’m giving myself gray hairs watching you, so I’ll be in the vegetable garden if you need me.”
Will secured the final patch and then climbed onto highest rung, checking with his hands for any places that might soon wear thin.
“Well,” called a voice that was decidedly not Mrs. Tanner’s. “This is a sight.”
Will looked over his shoulder and saw Martin grinning up at him, bareheaded, his hands in his pockets. He lowered himself to the ground. “It’s good to see you out and about.”
“I told you it was a mere cold,” Martin said. His voice was laden with a degree of smugness that would have been unbearable if Will hadn’t been so fond of him.
“You seem to expect me to be quite put out to have been wrong,” Will said, nudging him with an elbow as soon as he reached the ground. “I’mgladit was only a cold, you daft bastard.”
“Daft bastard,” Martin said, sighing dramatically. “I suppose I’ll have to be at death’s door if I want to be called sweetheart again.”
Will paused halfway through brushing the straw from his trousers. He thought he had understood what Martin meant the other night when he said he didn’t want to wait, and was pretty sure he hadn’t only been referring to stargazing. But he thought they’d spend weeks edging closer, testing boundaries and limits. Will hadn’t expected anything so blunt; Martin rarely came out and said what he wanted. Instead he hinted, suggested, slid meaning into the space between words that hadn’t been spoken. By Martin’s standards, this sideways remark would be an outright proposition from anyone else. No—it was the equivalent of being pressed against the wall behind a molly house. Will was faintly shocked.
“Death’s door? Two minutes ago it was a common cold,” Will said blandly, “sweetheart. And here I was wondering whether I had to wait for you to jackass around in the middle of the night again to come up with an excuse to get you back in my lap.” When he glanced over, Martin had flushed to the tips of his ears.
Really, Will just wanted to make Martin feel good, whatever that meant to Martin. If that meant soft words and gentle touches that never progressed to anything heated, that would be more than enough. Martin had spent a lifetime with too few good things. As far as what Will wanted—yes, he wanted to kiss Martin, to please him, to strip him bare and get his mouth on every inch of him. He had been thinking about that more and more, and now it was hard to be in the same room as Martin without noticing things—how his throat worked when he swallowed his tea, the way he sometimes blew a stray lock of hair off his forehead, the length of his legs, the smell of his skin.
“What else needs to be done before you leave?” Martin asked.
Will made his way across the garden to where Mrs. Tanner knelt in what appeared to be a potato patch. “Do you want me to fix that fence rail today or wait until we have Daisy around, ma’am?” he called. It was a two-person job, and the woman looked too knackered to hold up her end of a rail.
“It’ll keep until—oh!” Mrs. Tanner broke off when she saw Martin standing behind Will. “You gave me a fright,” she said, clutching her heart with one hand.
“I’m afraid she definitely knew my father,” Martin said grimly once they were on the path back to the cottage. “And odds are he was not particularly good to her.”
“Where your father’s concerned, those are always the winning odds,” Will agreed. “That doesn’t mean she knows who you are, though.”
“I’m going to have to tell her, I think. She’s poaching from under my nose and I ought to at least tell her that I don’t mind.”
