Page 7 of Two Rogues Make a Right
“My God. And you listened to her?”
“Don’t you feel healed by Daisy’s tender ministrations? By her womanly gentleness?”
“Well, I suppose I ought to at least put on a pair of trousers and drag my weary bones from this bed so that child—Daisy, of all the foolishness—can clatter about.” Miracle of miracles, he actually got his legs out of the bed on the first try, and stepped into a pair of trousers with minimal effort. He was weak, as anybody would be after being ill for so long, but he felt better than he had in months.
“You seem in fine fettle,” Will said.
Martin could have told him it was always like this as his body slowly returned to itself. It was a base animal thrill at continued life, nothing more, and it would dissipate. He would have said as much, but Will was looking at him, his hair rumpled, his smile tense and fragile, and Martin didn’t want to disappoint him. “I am,” he said.
“I’m glad,” Will said. He still hadn’t attempted to get up from the pallet. One really would think that his years in the navy would have made him better at getting out of bed in the morning, but evidently one would be mistaken. Besides, Martin preferred not to think of Will’s time in the navy. He had a list as long as his arm of things to feel guilty about, and the only reason he could get by from day to day was to resolutely refuse to think about any of them.
“I’m enchanted by the novelty of being able to fill my lungs.” Martin demonstrated, and was stopped by a pang on his left side. “Or to partly fill them, at least.”
“The doctor said you broke a rib coughing. He said not to try binding it up because then you’d risk injuring your lungs. So I’m afraid it may have healed badly. I’m sorry about that.”
Martin was silent for a moment as he tried to organize a suitable response to that nonsense. “Were you under the impression that I was about to complain about the care you took of me? Idiot.” For whatever reason, that made Will smile daftly at him. When Will finally got to his feet, Martin looked away, becoming very interested in fluffing his pillow. “Get dressed so that young harridan can come back in. Speaking of which, have you been sleeping on the floor this whole time?” A kinder man than Martin might have noticed that already, but Martin was rather pleased with himself for noticing it at all.
“Uh. No. The first few days I just dozed in the chair.”
“In that chair. The one that has a hard back and no arms.”
“The very same.”
“You do realize the bed is large enough to hold us both.” He really shouldn’t be asking Will to share a bed with him. It was a terrible idea by any standards, even Martin’s, and Martin hadn’t had a good idea inyears. But he couldn’t very well let Will sleep on the cold stone floor after quite literally saving Martin’s life, such as it was.
Will shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m a restless sleeper.”
Martin gaped. “I wake coughing ten times a night. You can’t possibly think that you’d disturb me.”
“I mean.” He scuffed the toe of his boot along the floor, as if he were ten years old and had been caught stealing plums. “Nightmares. You know.”
Martin was seized with the usual urge to lay waste to His Majesty’s Navy but contented himself with pressing his lips together. “Of course. Cold, hard floors are the preferred surface upon which to have nightmares. Well known fact.”
“You needed rest and I didn’t want to disturb you. I wasn’t sleeping terribly well anyway, given that every time you stirred I thought—” He broke off.
“You thought I was having death throes. Good God we’re a cheerful pair. When did you send for a doctor? I remember none of this.”
Will looked shifty.
“William.”
“I brought you to a doctor in London before bringing you here. He gave us some medicine and told me to get you away from the smoke as quickly as possible.”
“And I went willingly?”
“Not exactly. The doctor dosed you and his assistant helped me carry you out to the carriage.”
“You abducted me?” He was about to say something flip, likeI didn’t know you had it in you, but his voice caught on the words. He didn’t like the idea that Will had made a decision for him, without his consent. It reminded him too much of his father, of all the doctors, of many years spent helpless. He knew that Will bringing his nearly lifeless body to a doctor and subsequently to the country wasn’t the same as anything his father had done. But it still poked at a wound that was always a bit raw.
Chapter Four
Sharing close quarters with Will was an absolute nightmare in ways Martin had never before contemplated. The man was forever taking his shirt off and just walking around as if that were a perfectly normal and unremarkable thing to do. Perhaps it was; Martin had no experience with what other men did. Perhaps they all wandered around in various states of undress. Martin had made it his life’s work never to find out; whatever moral failings he had inherited from his father, he wouldn’t let debauchery be one of them.
For the first month at the cottage and a long while beforehand, Martin thought his interest in sex had been killed by the consumption. If anything, he had been relieved. It wasn’t as if those urges had done him any good in the past. But now, it was like his prick was making up for lost time. He had gone months without thinking about the thing and now the bastard couldn’t sit still.
It did not help that Will Sedgwick seemed to forever be missing half of his clothes, despite it being February, and Martin simply couldn’t stop himself from looking. He had never been able to stop himself from looking at Will, damn it. That was the central problem of his life (other than the intermittent dying, at least). Despite his admittedly feeble best intentions, he caught his gaze lingering on Will’s chest, its dusting of dark hair, its lean muscles. And his arms—wiry but strong, three birds inked high up, near the shoulder. Those goddamn birds, Martin could not stop looking at them. Surely officers in the navy did not get tattoos, which probably meant Will had gotten them done after being disrated and reduced to the status of a common sailor, but he couldn’t ask without also asking about the rest of it. Martin felt vaguely perverse for the attention he paid to those birds, wanting to put his mouth on them, wanting to feel Will’s biceps shift under his lips. The fact that they at best symbolized a youthful carefree innocence that Will could never regain, and at worst were the product of those last months of misery aboard ship, made shame spiral in Martin’s belly. He really was no better than his father. He’d tell himself that, repeat it like the chorus to a hymn, but Will would flash a smile at him and Martin would find himself grinning back, unrepentant, and then he’d only look some more. At least Martin had put an end to the deliberate, affectionate touching. But even accidental contact, of the sort that was unavoidable in a cottage this small, sent waves of awareness throughout Martin’s body. Every time their sleeves brushed or they bumped shoulders in the doorway, Martin wanted to lean into the touch and purr like a cat.
The worst part was that he couldn’t get away from the temptation. He could walk outside, fill the kettle at the pump, and then put it on the fire. He could stroll twice around the outside of the cottage. Once, on a sunny day, he hung up some washing on the line. Martin needed to get better, and then needed to figure out where he would go, how he would live, because the sooner he left this cottage, the better. The longer he sat around pining after Will, the greater the odds that Will would notice.
