Here's chapter two! Thanks to everybody who read and reviewed—I'm sorry I haven't produced any lemony goodness yet, but I promise that it is coming. Eventually. I just wanted to get an appropriate amount of tension mounted before I let the poor dears snap.

Disclaimer: Hmm, nope! Still don't own Robin Hood!

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Five days. Five long, long days, and he still hadn't cracked. She had no idea how—she was fairly on edge herself, so she couldn't imagine how Will was keeping a rein on his self-control. Not with everything she'd been doing to him of late.

Having decided that she was going to go ahead and try to enjoy as much of Will Scarlett as she could while there was still time, she'd set about the task of actually seducing the young man. This was much easier in theory than it was in practice. To begin with, she didn't need the rest of the gang, and the handful of other passengers, and the ship's crew to know what she was doing, so she had had to go about it very carefully so nobody could see what she was doing. This meant discreet touches, whispered words, and stolen kisses in dark corners.

At the start, he seemed almost pleased that she was being so forward. It probably came as a relief to him, because he was too nervous to start anything himself. Though shy in the beginning, he was soon responding to those little touches with his own, and later catching her in private for a kiss every so often. Djaq began to think that maybe this whole thing wouldn't be as difficult as she thought it would be.

And then one night, when he followed her up on deck where they knew they could be reasonably alone, things had changed. For a while they stood together by the rail, wrapped close in the warm folds of his old cloak and enjoying what passed for 'solitude' on the crowded little ship. She had snuggled back against his chest, shielding herself from the cold night air and cocooning herself almost completely in cloak and tunic and Will. He smelled familiarly of well-worn clothes, the tang of metal from the weapons he carried, of timber, and the faint smell of the forest they all left behind.

Then he'd made the first move, which was strange for him—before that he always let her be the one to decide to go first. It wasn't a blatant show of affection, but with them the actions never needed to be for the meaning to come across; he brought his hands up her arms, scraping ever so lightly with his fingernails through the thin materials of her coat and her shirt, raising delicious waves of goosebumps all over her wherever his hands went. He lipped her neck, her cheek, her ear, sometimes kissing and sometimes just ghosting his lips over her skin. It was enough to make her melt, though there wasn't a great deal that Will could do that didn't make her absolutely giddy.

She'd turned in his arms, pausing just long enough to look at him in the insufficient light cast by the tiniest little sliver of new moon above them—how there be so much beautiful in just one man?—and smiled before kissing him soundly. That time, there hadn't been any surprise at her action, and he responded quickly, arduously, devouring her kisses as if he had been starved for them. He wrapped his arms tight around her back and held her flush against him, determined to get rid of any of that pesky, unnecessary space in between them.

Oh, it was wonderful. She mouthed all the way down his neck and his collarbone—the most skin she could reach with his tunic blocking her way any further—and he placed ticklish little feather-light kisses on as much of her as he could get to without divesting her of her clothing. When she gently bit down on his neck, a little groan escaped him as he exhaled, and Djaq nearly felt her heart stop beating.

From there, things escalated. Hands turned curious, leaving the relative safety of arms and shoulders to roam other places—up and down stomachs and backs, resting on one another's hips and backsides and scraping at the loose edges of clothing.

Her hands reached below the neckline of his tunic, exploring his back and broad shoulders. She felt his muscles tense briefly at her touch, then relax again as he sighed quietly. She voiced breathy whispers of permission between kisses, and slowly he began to slide his hands under the hem of her shirt, just gently hovering over her waist, tentatively brushing bare skin with trembling fingers and driving her absolutely crazy.

She tightened her arms around his neck and kissed him again; his arms wound around her beneath her shirt, pulling the garment up and exposing her bare back and stomach to the coarse material of his clothing and cloak. Whimpering, she tried to get even closer to him, only to discover that there was no more space between them to do away with.

He withdrew his hands from her bare skin; Djaq whined low in her throat in protest, wriggling against him and trying to get him to bring them back. Then he clawed wantonly at her leather bodice, pulling the straps down her arms. She didn't give it a second thought—she shrugged out of the garment, using one hand to pull it down her torso, over her hips and thighs, and hastily stepped out of it, kicking it to the side, all without taking her mouth away from his.

With the thick leather covering gone, she could better feel his chest against hers. It sent white-hot sparks through her whole body, a warm feeling pooling between her thighs. Instinctively, she brought one leg up and hooked it over his hip. That contact had nearly made her fall right off of him onto the floor.

Will gasped, tensed up, and drew back sharply. She'd nearly screamed. What was he doing? She remembered looking at his face and seeing an odd expression, as if he was considering something he hadn't thought of before.

"What?" She'd asked pleadingly. "Will, what is it?"

"I—I'm sorry. I… can't. I can't…" he was turning bright red, backing further and further away from her. "We can't do this."

He was going to make her absolutely crazy this way. "Why not?"

"Because. We just… can't. I'm sorry."

And with that he'd left.

Djaq loosed a frustrated sigh. What had happened then? She still didn't know, and it was two days ago. He'd been avoiding her since then.

And she never found her bodice. She didn't know where she'd flung it after she took it off and when she came back the next morning to look for it, it was nowhere to be found.

How irritating.

She hugged her legs tightly up to her chest and sighed into her knees. She'd been sitting here in this little space in the hold, between two crates, for some time now absorbed in thought. It occurred to her that Will might have been unsure of the idea of, well, sex. They weren't married and both of them had been taught their whole lives that those… relations were taboo outside of married couples. That didn't mean that nobody did them—far from it—but it did mean that such things weren't spoken about in polite company in either of their cultures. But unlike Will, she had been forced to confront the veracity of the ideals of the tenants of faith over the years, and decided that those who represented Allah in this world couldn't always be trusted to know what was best for everybody at all times; she knew enough that she could question or even throw away some of the things she had been taught over the years.

She was a firm believer in the idea that Allah helped those who helped themselves. She had been given this second chance with the man she loved, and she had no idea if they would have enough time to do all of the proper things, to marry him and to save herself for their wedding night; what would it say about her resolve if she wasted this chance?

But young Will Scarlett might not have confronted these things the way she had, whether through ignorance or simply never giving any merit to second-guessing the Christian priests. The more she thought on it, the more it began to make sense. He was trying his best, keeping his passion in check and avoiding her, maintaining the belief that this was the only way to do right by her—when all she wanted was him.

She only wished she could make him see that, but it was so hard to get hold of him these days. Although even if she did manage to catch him, she wasn't sure how to make him see it—part of her hoped that just explaining it to him would do the trick, but another part of her worried that nothing short of stripping naked and pleading would work.

And, knowing him, it would probably frighten him. She recalled with an internal giggle the day she came into the gang, when an extremely surprised Will accidentally walked up on her bathing. At the time she had been angry and embarrassed that the Englishman had snuck up on her and surprised her, seen her bathing, seen her breasts—so angry that she accused him, erroneously, of spying on her and then stormed off, smacking him in the face with a tree branch as she walked away, covering her chest with her towel and trying to maintain her dignity as best as she could. But as she looked back on the event in her mind—something she did far more often than she would have admitted to anybody—she knew how utterly shocked he'd been. His mouth dropped open and his eyes nearly came right out of his head. It was probably the first time he'd ever seen a woman naked, or even partially naked.

The poor boy was so sweetly, heartbreakingly innocent.

She was going to have to fix that.

But first she had to talk to him.

What time was it now? She had no idea. If she went up on deck, she could have a look and see, but she didn't feel like moving. The gang had eaten supper without her—she declined food, said she wasn't hungry, and went to look for a quiet place to hide for a while to be alone with her thoughts. Most of the day had been spent covertly watching Will as he walked several laps around the ship's deck, climbing over cannons and carefully making his way around the hull and back again, over and over again, to let off some steam. She admired his deft footing whenever he climbed up on the rail to avoid colliding with another person and the swiftness with which he moved from one side of the ship to another; she loved when he gently took his upper lip into his mouth to clear the fine beads of sweat from his thin little moustache, and the tiny frown on his face as he was deep in concentration.

He was starting to go a little bit crazy with pent-up energy. They were all slowly going a bit mad on the tiny little cramped vessel, with very little room to move and stretch their legs—it was an incredibly uncomfortable feeling, especially being so used to living in Sherwood with the entire forest as their domain. It was hard to go from miles of beautiful, leafy woodland to a hundred-foot wooden boat on open water.

Her mind kept going back in the same direction. There were other ways to let off that energy other than trotting around the deck and weaving through the rope works…

Djaq shook her head fiercely in an effort to clear it. She had to stop thinking about that. She would drive herself crazy even quicker that way.

All she could do was wait, she told herself. She made her own intentions clear to him—now it was just a matter of waiting for his nerves to subside. In the meantime, she was going to have to sate herself with the memories of their last encounter, of his lips moving warmly against hers, his hands sliding all over her torso under her shirt, the way he scratched so desperately at her bodice to rid her of that terribly obstructive garment. Shivers coursed through her as her body remembered the feel of those rough carpenter's hands on her bare skin.

She peeked quickly at herself and sighed, crossing her arms over her chest. She remembered why she wore that leather bodice to begin with—it kept her from being a walking temperature gauge. Once—once—she went without it on a spring afternoon, and she felt fine until Allan teasingly asked her, "Feeling a bit chilly, Djaq?", whereupon she dashed, red-faced, back to her little curtained-off bunk in the camp and put it back on. Of course, chilly temperatures weren't the only thing she'd react to—she could easily blame it on the cold if anybody saw it, but she'd know what was really making her nipples peak under her shirt.

And she'd have to find a reasonable way of explaining her missing bodice to her friends.

Her legs were beginning to prickle from being folded up and held against her for such a long time. Wincing, she unfurled them and laid them flat on the floor below her. The sounds above her head—the footsteps of people walking along the deck and the idle chatter of passengers and shouted orders to crew members—had all stopped some time ago. It sounded like the activity of the daytime finally died down. Maybe now was the best time to go up and get some fresh air. She was growing tired of breathing the stale, damp, 'fragrant' air down here in the hold.

Her backside was numb from sitting for so long, as she discovered when she tried to stand up and found it oddly difficult to do so. She carefully walked herself up the ladder and through the hatch, pulling herself up onto the deck.

It was late.

The sky was black, and tonight it was cloudy—no visible moon, and only the occasional patch of sky visible through the clouds—and terribly cold. She hugged her coat futilely, wishing it would keep her warmer, and stepped out towards the rail. There was a good wind, she noted absently. The sails were bulged outwards, and the speed carrying them forward caused a stiff wind to barrage the deck.

The wind, and what it meant, made her shiver. The more the wind blew, the faster they would move. The faster they went, the closer they grew to Acre—and to whatever might happen there.

Her bottom jaw began to tremble involuntarily as she shivered. She didn't want to go back down with the gang to sleep yet. She'd spent all day down there, breathing that stale air, and didn't want to go back to it just yet.

With the air roaring in her ears, she didn't hear the man walk up behind her. She had no idea that he was there until folds of a cloth settled over her shoulders. She jumped.

"What—!"

"You looked cold," Will said as he came to stand next to her, leaning on his elbows on the wood rail.

The cloth around her was made of some sort of silky fabric; it was a pinkish colour on one side, and cream colour on the other, long and wide and reasonably heavy. She pulled it around herself, finding more cloth in the folds than she would have thought there was. Almost right away she warmed up.

"Thank you," she said softly, smiling at him. She was more than a little surprised to see him here, all alone with her, especially now while it was late and there were few other people around. "Where did you find this?" She asked, trying to keep the conversation going, but keep it innocent so he wouldn't run away.

"Does it matter?"

"Will—"

"I bartered it off of one of the sailors," he admitted.

"Bartered?"

Nod.

"Bartered," she said, this time voiced it as a statement rather than a question.

"Yes. I—I know you're cold here, and that you lost your… bodice," he said, his words halting and hesitating as he said the word. She wondered if he was thinking about the night she misplaced it. Probably. "I don't like seeing you cold and uncomfortable."

She decided not to ask anything further about it—it was probably rude and she was grateful for the cloth. He was so impossibly sweet; he knew she was missing her bodice and that she was freezing. So he'd somehow obtained something to keep her warm on the cold nights on board the ship.

When she turned to thank him again, all she saw was the hatch to the hold closing.

She noticed later that his little leather belt-purse, where he kept what little money he had, was missing.

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I couldn't resist a slightly porny explanation for why Djaq a) lost her bodice, and b) gained a shawl. I love writing a thoughtful!Will—he's so sweet, isn't he?

I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter! And please review if you feel so inclined.