Two Rogues Make a Right

by Cat Sebastian

  “You know, I thought the consumption killed all that,” Martin said, letting out a shaky breath.

  “Killed what?” Will asked, moving so he could nuzzle into the other side of Martin’s neck.

  “My prick, William, pay attention. I thought it was broken.” He heard Will wheeze and felt him shaking against Martin’s back. “You had better not be laughing at me.”

  “I’m not. It’s just funny. Especially since every morning I see for myself that it’s working perfectly fine.”

  “Well, now it is, especially since I wake up with yours ramming me in the thigh half the time.” Without even planning to, he pushed back, gently pressing against Will’s length.

  Will hissed and jerked his hips forward, then stayed there, not moving, just holding their bodies close together.

  Then Martin sneezed and Will handed him a handkerchief so he could blow his nose, and the tension was broken. Or, rather, not broken, just eased enough that they could live with their arousal and not feel like they had to do anything about it.

  When they went indoors, Will threw open the curtains and shoved the bed against the wall, announcing that this way Martin could see the stars without having to go outside if he didn’t want to, then pulled Martin down into bed beside him. They fell asleep tangled up together, and the last thing Martin remembered before falling asleep was the feel of Will’s fingers carding through his hair.

  The next morning Martin was no better and grudgingly agreed to let Will send for Mr. Booth. As soon as the doctor walked through the door, Will almost sagged with relief to finally have an expert on hand.

  His hopes were dashed almost immediately. “Not much to be done,” the doctor said, clucking over Martin. “He needs brisk walks and fresh air. No need to keep the fire burning quite so high.”

  Brisk walks and fresh air? The physician in London had advised rest and warmth and spoken at length about the dangers of drafts. Will had no idea whose advice they were meant to follow.

  The doctor took a vial out of his bag. “And a spoonful of this, whenever the coughing gets too bad for him to sleep.”

  “What’s in it?” Martin asked.

  “What’s in it?” the doctor repeated, as if startled to hear his patient speak. “Things that will help you get better, young man.”

  “I believe he wants to know the ingredients,” Will said, already regretting having sent for the doctor.

  “I see,” Mr. Booth said, as if Will had asked him something highly inappropriate. “Camphor, peppermint oil, tincture of opium, licorice, and honey. I mix it up myself, and can assure you—”

  “I won’t take it,” Martin said. “Please remove it.”

  “I’ll just put it here by your bed—”

  “I said to remove it,” Martin repeated, every inch the heir of Lindley Priory.

  “Thank you, Mr. Booth, but that’ll be all.” Will paid the man his fee and sent him on his way. “I can afford medicine,” he said quietly upon reentering the cottage.

  “I’m well aware. But there’s no sense in paying for a thing we already have.”

  Will looked at the assemblage of vials and bottles that stood on the chimneypiece. On the last market day, Will had stocked up on the remedies everybody seemed to recommend for a persistent cough. Peppermint oil, camphor, and licorice were all there, not to mention willow bark. The only ingredient they didn’t have was—Will’s face heated. “Tell me you didn’t turn that medicine down because you don’t trust me in the same room as opium.”

  From the look on Martin’s face, Will knew he was right. Will shoved his hands in his pockets and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, striving to keep his voice calm and failing utterly.

  He walked to the hill overlooking Friars’ Gate. That was where Martin ought to be, a house like that, with people who knew how to take care of him. He was sick with shame that Martin turned down a medication that might have brought him some relief only because he was worried about Will. That winter, Will had eyed that bottle of laudanum, had inhaled its peculiar odor and thought about what it would feel like to swallow just a little, but he hadn’t done it. Partly because that laudanum belonged to Martin, partly because he didn’t want to go down that path again, and, if he were honest, partly because he doubted the amount of opium in the tincture would have had much of an effect on him. But he had been able to resist.

  When Will got back to the cottage, Martin was out of bed and in the chair by the fire, wrapped in a quilt. “Let me talk first,” Martin said. “My refusing that medicine has nothing to do with not trusting you. I was with you those first few months after you got home.”

  “I know, and I’m grateful.”

  “I’m not looking for gratitude,” Martin snapped. “I saw how the laudanum affected other people in those places. I saw how desperate people got when they were in the habit of taking it. And I also saw how much relief it brought you, at a time when nothing else seemed to help you at all. From all that, I can infer that it’s taken an effort for you no longer to use the stuff, and I don’t want you to be forced to look at it every day in your own home.”

  Will dug his fingernails into the meat of his thighs. “The first two weeks we were here, I gave you laudanum around the clock until the bottle ran out. I was sorely tempted to help myself. But that’s going to be the case for the rest of my life and—damn it, Martin, if you let my own bad choices ruin your health, I won’t forgive you. I won’t forgive myself.”

  “Your bad choices,” Martin repeated, his voice suddenly gentle. “Will. When you came back to England with your mind half gone and your back still bleeding, I don’t think a damned thing you did was much of a choice.”

  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’m glad it 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.”

  Will considered this. “I don’t know if that’ll help or make things worse. If you tell her who you are, you’re letting her know you could make trouble if you wanted.”

  “Then what do I do? I’m trying to do right by them. I like her, and I even like Daisy, despite her foul temper. Because of her foul temper, if I’m honest.”

  “Birds of a feather,” Will murmured, then smiled when Martin elbowed him. “I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t. I think you have to earn their trust somehow.”

  When they reached the cottage, Will glanced down at his sweaty clothes. “I’m going to wash up,” he announced.

  For some time, Martin had been going to great pains to avoid seeing Will unclothed, but Will hadn’t understood precisely why. Now he knew that Martin fleeing the cottage when Will began stripping was Martin trying to be decent. And God knew Martin had precious few models of what it looked like when a man decided to be decent, so Will was sort of touched by this bashfulness, and he tried to meet Martin halfway by announcing well in advance when and where he planned to be naked. Will didn’t much care about nakedness himself; he figured that was the natural result of four brothers and several years in close quarters at sea. He knew some people were troubled by the scars on his back, even more so if they knew their origin, but other than that he supposed his body was as unremarkable as anybody else’s.

  When he finished, shivering but clean and dressed in fresh clothes, he went indoors. Martin had set their little table with the plain earthenware dishes and tin spoons Will had unearthed in the loft, and when Will walked in he was fidgeting with one of the plates, turning it around so a chip wouldn’t be visible from Will’s seat. It was such a small and homely gesture, so totally pointless—Will didn’t care about chipped crockery, but obviously Martin did, which was what made it sweet. And it was even sweeter because this was one of the days Mrs. Tanner didn’t make their supper: all this effort was for bread and cheese.

  “You’re nothing like your father,” Will said. “And I think I’ve known you longer than anybody else alive, so you should probably concede my expertise on the topic.”

  Martin gave him a tiny, crooked smile. “I’m glad you think so, at least.”

  “I know so,” Will said, crossing the room to stand close enough to Martin that he was worried his wet hair would drip onto the other man.

  “Will,” Martin said. “I really don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, not in any aspect of life, obviously, but especially not this.” He gestured at the space between their bodies.

  Will wanted to say that he didn’t know either, that this, somehow, felt like uncharted waters. Instead he put his hand on Martin’s hip. Martin shuddered. By now Will knew Martin wasn’t flinching so much as bracing for something good, like a child about to get a spoonful of treacle or an extra bedtime story.

  “Listen,” Martin said, his eyes squeezed shut, “what I’m saying is that I haven’t done this before, and I haven’t wanted to. But I haven’t wanted to want to, if you understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do, but I’d like to.” With his thumb, he rubbe
d a circle into Martin’s hip.

  Martin let out a shaky laugh. “That makes two of us. With the people you’ve been with, it was good, right?”

  Will raised his eyebrows. “I hope so?” Then he understood Martin’s meaning. “When I’ve been with somebody, it’s—it’s a chance for two people to make one another feel good. And special, and cared for, and any number of pleasant things. Just because people like your father take something good and make it into something twisted and wrong doesn’t mean that the act itself is the problem.” He swallowed. “Anything we do, it’s you and me. Whether it’s going to bed together or playing cards or eating supper. I want you to like whatever we do together. That’s the most important thing to me.”

  Martin nodded, and Will wondered if he had just needed to hear someone tell him that what he wanted wasn’t inherently evil. Will hoped Martin had known it already and just needed reassurance. As Will watched, Martin brought his hand up slowly, as if giving Will time to stop him, then cupped Will’s jaw in his hand. With the pad of his thumb, he traced Will’s lower lip, all the while looking like he had been pole-axed. Then he leaned in and replaced his thumb with his lips, brushing over Will’s mouth with his own. It was gentle, sweet, barely a kiss at all, but Will felt something unexpected and fierce coil up inside him.

  Martin pulled away, his eyes wide and his fingertips covering his mouth, and Will knew he looked just as dazed.