Two Rogues Make a Right

by Cat Sebastian

  Before stepping through the cottage door, he steeled himself for the chance of finding Martin in distress or worse, but only after putting his hand to the door latch did he realize that this time he fully expected his friend to be alive. Martin was still pale, but had lost the grayish pallor of illness. His coughs had diminished in quantity and severity. His fever showed no signs of returning. Whatever crisis had been brought on by the idiot’s stay in a drafty attic had truly passed. Will had successfully nursed him through it. And while Martin might have preferred to have been left to meet his end alone, Will wasn’t going to be sorry for having intervened.

  He placed his parcels on the table and glanced up to find Martin looking at him with a faint blush and an expression that might have been sheepish on anyone else. Will raised his eyebrows.

  “Can we take it as read?” Martin asked.

  “Take what as read?” Will asked, shrugging out of his coat.

  “That I’m sorry to have met your generosity with my ill manners.”

  “I accept your first three words. The rest is rubbish and you can shove it right up your arse. You know perfectly well you saved me—”

  “We don’t talk about that,” Martin said, as he always did when reminded of those awful few months two years ago, when Will had returned from sea, shattered and broken.

  “Fine,” Will conceded. “But you realize you’re not dying at the moment, right?”

  “That possibility has occurred to me,” Martin said about as primly as a man could while wearing a secondhand nightshirt.

  “Yeah, well, it’s occurred to me too. After I sat next to you for a fucking fortnight, trying to figure out what I’d have to do to afford a funeral.”

  “You needn’t—”

  “Needn’t have paid for a funeral? What should I have done? Left you here? Flung you into the woods?” Will buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be having this conversation with you.”

  Martin was silent for a long while. “I prefer it,” he said. “I think about those things all the time, so it’s just as well to hear them out in the open. But, as you say, you probably won’t need to consider funeral expenses in the immediate future.”

  Will took out his knife and pared off a slice of cheese, then sat on the edge of the bed and handed the morsel to Martin.

  “Really?” Martin asked, holding the sliver of cheese. “First soup and now cheese. We’re living like kings in—where are we?”

  “Sussex,” Will said, and saw a glimmer of suspicion in Martin’s eyes. Before Martin could ask any questions, Will said, “Now eat your damned cheese.” For once, Martin did as he was told. Will smiled at the look of stunned pleasure on his friend’s face. “I bet you’re glad you didn’t die now. No cheese in hell.”

  The look of barely suppressed laughter on Martin’s face warmed Will’s heart. “Fuck off, Will. That is—that is—just give me more cheese and shut up.”

  They ate half the wedge of cheese and the entire loaf of bread. At some point Will shifted so he sat beside Martin, his back to the headboard. His belly was full, his friend was alive, and that was really all Will had ever wanted. Happy and sated, he put his hand on Martin’s leg. Just a companionable touch, nothing they hadn’t done a thousand times before. There was nothing to it, so he was surprised when Martin batted his hand away.

  “None of that,” Martin snapped.

  Will’s cheeks heated. He hadn’t meant anything pointed, anything particular. He hadn’t even realized that Martin understood Will was the sort of man who could mean anything pointed or particular by a touch. “I’m sorry,” Will said, and rose from the bed to sit in the straight-backed chair by the fire.

  Martin woke to the sound of a broom swishing across the cottage’s flagstone floor and furniture being dragged out of the way with more noise than he might have thought possible, given that the cottage contained about four pieces of furniture.

  He rolled over to see what had possessed Will to start this clamor when the sun hadn’t quite risen, but instead of Will, he saw a yellow-haired girl in a plain dress and apron, wielding the broom like it was a weapon.

  “What on earth?” Martin said, propping himself on his elbows. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m your maid,” she said. Spat, really. “He—” she pointed an accusing finger to where Will still slept on a pallet by the fire “—hired me.”

  “And I’ll fire you,” Martin said, “if you let that chair topple onto Mr. Sedgwick.”

  “Go ahead!”

  “What on earth,” he repeated. It occurred to him that perhaps his fever had returned, and that this entire scene was a febrile delusion.

  Will, finally alerted to the battle progressing mere inches away from his face, stirred. “Oh,” he said, sitting up. “This is Daisy Tanner. She’s been tidying up in the mornings and bringing us supper.”

  Which meant Martin must have slept through this uproar on previous mornings. He had wondered where the food had been coming from, and who brought clean linens, but he had been raised in a house staffed with an army of servants; he was used to things simply getting done. “She seems less than thrilled about it,” he observed. “Did you win her in a card game? Buy her off a pirate ship?”

  “My mother sent me here because she thinks the ostler is after me,” the girl said.

  “After—oh,” Martin said. “Well, is he?”

  The girl turned scarlet.

  “Do you want him to be? Are you after him? Is the ostler some kind of rural Casanova? In any event, this cottage is hardly larger than a stable stall. I daresay you can finish your work in under an hour and you’ll have the entire afternoon to get yourself seduced. Now, step outside for a moment while Mr. Sedgwick and I make ourselves decent. Neither of us are inclined to duel the ostler for your honor, I assure you.” He made a shooing motion until the girl left. When the door slammed shut, he turned to Will and raised a single questioning eyebrow.

  “I let myself get bullied,” Will said. “Her mother told me nursing invalids is women’s work.”

  “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 Wil
l 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 in years. 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, like I 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.

  The real problem was that he couldn’t imagine what he’d do after leaving. He had been raised to be the owner of Lindley Priory, as had his father and his father’s father and all the Easterbrooks before them. But the priory was gone, the coffers were empty, and there were no more Easterbrooks. There was no place in the world for Sir Martin Easterbrook, and he didn’t know how to go about finding one. Until a year ago, Martin had never so much as combed his own hair or rinsed out his own teacup, partly because he was the pampered heir to the Easterbrook fortune, but also because he had always been told he was too frail to take care of himself. He was disgusted by his own helplessness, but didn’t know how to go about learning otherwise.

  With that in mind, Martin decided he could not live another hour without bathing. He knew he was hopelessly spoiled by a youth spent in the lap of luxury, but dabbing at himself with a sponge was simply not going to cut it. As there was no proper bath to be had, and no servant to draw one, he steeled himself, went out to the pump, stripped hastily down to his small clothes, and soaped himself up with the bar of tallow soap they kept by the wash basin. The water was freezing, but he dumped a bucket over his head and began working the soap across his scalp. He poured another bucket over his hair, shivering and shaking all the while, but the sense of weeks—months, even—of grime being rinsed clean away was nothing less than glorious.

  “Are you mad?” Will sputtered, coming back from wherever he went when he left the cottage. “Are you trying to kill yourself? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.” He stomped off into the cottage and emerged with a blanket, which he wrapped around Martin’s shoulders.

  “I just wanted to bathe,” Martin said, his teeth chattering.

  “You could have asked—”

  “I could have asked you to bathe me? I think not, William,” he said with as much asperity as he could muster. Will flushed.

  “No, damn it. Just get indoors.” He set Martin before the hearth, then climbed a ladder to a loft that Martin hadn’t noticed before. A few minutes later a tin tub came clattering to the floor. Martin, his eyes occasionally drifting shut because of sleepiness and cold, watched Will fill pots and basins with water, then heat them over the fire. He couldn’t have said how long it took before the tub was filled, but eventually Will wiped his hands on his trousers and said, “Come on, now. If you don’t get in, then I’m using the water for my own bath.”

  The thought of having to watch Will strip and bathe was enough to make Martin spr
ing into action. He was already naked except for the blanket, his small clothes having been discarded outside. He didn’t drop the blanket until just before stepping into the tub. He was well aware that he wasn’t much to look at these days—not that he wanted Will to be looking, not that he cared, but he knew that he was a sorry sight. He was naturally broad shouldered and large boned, and skinniness didn’t sit well on him. As he stepped into the tub, he saw Will deliberate between turning his back out of decency or coming to his aid out of innate mother hennishness. Decency won, because it always did with Will, the bastard.

  “Oh God,” Martin groaned when he sank into the tub, his irritation draining away as soon as he touched the hot water. “This is lovely.” He hadn’t had a proper bath since he left his aunt’s house in the autumn. The warmth and the sense of purification both seeped into his bones. Will had set a flannel, a cake of soap, and a cup next to the tub, and Martin set about scrubbing himself clean. “Thank you,” he said, moved to goodwill by the soap bubbles.

  “I should have thought of it sooner,” Will said. He still had his back to the bath, and was busily arranging a stack of books. “I forgot what a finicky little shit you can be.”

  “Where did those books come from?” Martin asked. He was certain they hadn’t been there earlier. For the past month they had been rereading the same books Will had read aloud when Martin had been too feverish to pay attention.

  “Hartley brought them.”

  “Hartley was here?”

  “He comes every week or two. I met him at the inn this afternoon.”

  “Does he know I’m here?”

  Will turned around at that, a quizzical expression on his face. “Yes. He’s the only one who does, though.”

  “But you didn’t bring him here? To the cottage?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want that.”

  Indeed, Martin wouldn’t have wanted to see Hartley, but he resented Will’s assumption. He and Hartley and Will had once been the best of friends, in the way that boys of the same age who live in reasonable proximity will simply fall in among one another. They had traipsed about the hills and gone swimming during Martin’s periods of good health. And during Martin’s periods of poor health, the Sedgwick brothers had gone to great lengths to sneak into his rooms and pass him messages.