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