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