Tripoli Shore Leave

Sten was straddling Lieutenant Branson’s hips on the berth in the British Royal Navy ship’s third officer’s small cabin aboard the thirty-eight-gun fifth-rate frigate HMS Imperieuse, riding at anchor just off the Tripoli harbor. In April of 1805, the British and their allies were in a temporary, fleeting stalemate with the Barbary pirates on the northern African Mediterranean coast. The pirates, usually centered in Tripoli, had moved east, leaving the port open, at least for now. The allies had lifted the siege and it was as if all was forgiven for the moment. The sailors from the allied ships were welcome in the city to help fill the coffers of the businesses there once more. The allied forces were gullible enough to believe that welcome came from the Arabs of the streets as well as the business community.

A sailor on the Imperieuse, Sten, nineteen, was riding the cock of the red-headed, florid, stocky, twenty-six-year-old ship’s third officer. Such was one of the Sten’s on-board duties to be used also in the service of the ship’s officers. Being small, blond, and handsome had been what had gotten Sten impressed into the job.

Sten wasn’t English, his name wasn’t Sten, and he hadn’t signed on with the Royal Navy. His family was from England, but they had immigrated to the newly established United States at Boston from the Devon, England, area when Sten was barely nineteen, and he had been signed on as an apprentice sailor on a Boston merchant ship bound for the Caribbean as soon as the family reached Boston, planning to move farther into the interior of the new country.

Sten, whose real name was Christopher Stenson, hadn’t made it to the Caribbean, however. When the ship had reached the open seas, a British man-of-war had come upon them and, as was a festering bone of contention between the new American country and the British Royal Navy, had taken sailors, including the barely nineteen-year-old Christopher off the merchantman and impressed them into British service. Christopher was not taken for his use on the masts, working the sails. He was taken because he was blond and handsome and small, and sailors needed their sport and release while at sea. It had become known while the British were selecting American sailors to impress that Christopher had lain under sailors on the American vessel. That was considered good reason for the British to take him onto their ship.

Since he had been impressed, he had been not only climbing in the rigging, serving meals in the officers’ mess, and grooming the ship officers’ uniforms and boots, but had lain under the officers and, when the ship’s captain was being generous, under the ship’s sailors as well.

The British had not only prostituted him and lost him to a family no longer in Boston, but they’d also taken his name—purposely, to make it hard for anyone to find him. They had taken his last name, “Stenson” and reduced it as a single given name of “Sten.” And, so, to all, including the young man himself after six months of impressment on the Imperieuse, Sten it was.

Today, Lieutenant Branson was getting his sport, exercise, and release before a contingent of the sailors, including Sten in his first step on dry land since being impressed, was to be rowed into the Tripoli harbor for a furlough day.

Both of the men were naked. Branson, stocky, but muscular, not fat, lay stretched out on his back on his berth. He was grasping the narrow hips of the young man, whose legs were bent and placed on either side of the ship officer’s beefy thighs. Sten, facing Branson’s head, was leaning back and grasping the man’s knees. Sten’s head also was flung back and he was concentrating on using the leverage of his knees to rise and fall on the thick cock rooted in the unruly flaming red pubic bush. Branson was harder to sheath than most of the other officers and sailors of the Imperieuse who fucked him, but the man was cleaner and better looking than most of the others and less cruel in the fuck than most.

After six months of serving the sailors on the ship, Sten had learned not just to tolerate, but also usually to enjoy the cocking. If nothing else, it made him feel important to the men and wanted. As long as he did it well, he’d be about the last one on board who would be thrown overboard. All sailors needed their release and preferred to do it in a warm, tight passage than in their own hands.

A bit of cruelty set in at this point, however. Not content with Sten rising and falling on the shaft, Branson gripped the young man’s hips hard and took over the movement, increasing the pace and intensity of the thrusting, lifting the young man and slamming him down on the punishing cock, pulling Sten deep. Both were panting hard. Sten was writhing above the man, moaning and murmuring, “Yes, yes, yes,” which he’d learned had been expected of him. Branson was grunting and thrusting, until he reached the point of holding, tensing, and then expending his breath as he jerked and released, jerked and released.

Sten cried out to the ceiling, “Yes, oh fuck yes!” It wasn’t a pretense. He enjoyed the sensation of a man releasing his seed inside him, breeding him.

Branson spread his legs wider and Sten collapsed back between them. The cock maintained purchase inside him, and both men sighed and moaned, concentrating on the thick shaft going flaccid inside the young man’s channel—if only for a few moments. Branson was young, fit, and virile. He would fuck Sten again before releasing the lad to shore leave.

The young man lay back between the man’s hairy legs, panting, still moving his pelvis, rocking gently on the man’s buried shaft, as he knew the redhead liked.

“You have plenty of time to meet your boat to the harbor,” the ship’s officer murmured, thinking ahead.

Sten fully knew what the man was thinking. “Yes.”

“You must stick close to the sailors you go with. Don’t get lost. And don’t get any ideas about jumping ship.”

“Yes, sir. No, sir.” Sten answered.

“You wouldn’t last long in the streets of Tripoli—a small, handsome, blond. You would not like what would happen to you. These Arabs can’t be trusted. They are animals. They have no control over their urges.”

“No, sir.” Sten didn’t think this would be a good time to point out that Branson hadn’t made much of an effort to control his own animal urges just now—and, most certainly, all of the other British soldiers who he serviced were no less than rutting animals.

“Ah, there is life again. Do you feel it?”

“Yes, sir.” He did. The thick cock was on the rise. The instructions were over. Branson moved a thigh over Sten’s body, dislodging the cock, but only momentarily, and turned the yielding young man onto his back, between the man’s thighs, Branson ran a beefy arm under the young man’s waist and lifted his pelvis, Sten’s torso streaming back onto the berth, his hands clutching at the wooden rails running on either side of the berth. Sten held on for dear life, crying out “Yes, yes, yes!” as Branson thrust back inside him—thrusting, thrusting, thrusting.

* * * *

Sten hadn’t been on dry land for six months when he rolled out of the longboat in the Tripoli harbor. From the harbor, the town looked like no other place that the young sailor had ever seen before. The land was barren, other than palm trees rising up between the houses, both of which were surprises to Sten. He’d never seen coastal land as bare as this or the exotic trees with green fronds fanning out above tall, slim trunks. And the houses were all a dull tan color by day as the town mounted a gentle slope from the harbor, but in the glow of the setting sun they would be luminous shades of red and orange and, in the twilight, a shimmering silver. They uniformly were flat roofed, with every-day life being conducted on the roofs, but pencil-thin towers rose out of the townscape here and there, from which haunting chanting in a complicated foreign tongue wafted out over the water several times a day. One of the other sailors told Sten that this had something to do with the heathen religion of the residents. It all was quite exotic to Sten, though, and he took the chance whenever he could as the longboat approached the quay to cast his eye on the town.

What assailed the young man’s senses the most as he fought to acquire his land legs, hanging back by necessity as the sailors he was with started moving up from the harbor into the town, was how closely packed the buildings were, with streets even narrower than those he had known in England and seen in Boston the short time he was there. And the people—in dusty robes and most barefoot—were milling around everywhere. The harbor area was teeming with noisy, swirling bodies.

It was there, in the harbor, where Sten could see the most activity. The streets leading up the hills from the harbor were congested, but nothing like right here in the harbor. It was like a beehive, disturbed and buzzing angrily. Sten saw that the British sailors were getting dirty looks. The Tripoli pirates who had given the town its business did not at all appreciate the attempt to blockade their activities or to challenge their right to tribute for the rite of passage from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. The allied ships had blockaded Tripoli for months. Sten was quickly becoming aware that the sentiment of the town was with the pirates, not with the British sailors. He looked around for his fellow sailors, feeling the need for them to stick together. But they were all gone. Despite their instructions, they had scattered in all different directions.

He was alone as a foreign sailor from a ship that had been blockading the town for months. He stood out, and not just because he was dressed as a British sailor, in a white tunic top over navy-blue bellbottom trousers, tight across the pelvis, and black boots. He stood out because he was a young-looking, blond, well-formed, and handsome European.

He had the urge to be somewhere other than this crowded harbor area. He moved through the crowd, with hands reaching out to touch him, especially his nearly platinum blond hair. He headed for a street that didn’t look as congested as the harbor and walked rapidly up the winding way, looking for any sign of the sailors he had landed with. As he had picked a stretch of street without a tavern on it, he saw none. The street opened up into an open market area—the souk—which, if anything, was more crowded than the harbor had been.

Again, hands reached out to touch him, to shove him, or to grab him to detain him for who knew what purpose? Some of the eyes he looked into reflected the anger and hatred he’d seen in the harbor, but more of them were laced with lust and were grinning at him. They were forcing him to one side of the narrow stone street.

A hand reached out of a doorway and pulled him inside.

“Careful, son, with that sunny hair and your size, you best not be walking alone in the streets of Tripoli.”

“You speak English,” Sten said, trying to focus in on the tall, slender, elderly gentleman who had pulled him into a copper shop. He wasn’t dressed in Arab robes as those milling around in the street were. He was wearing a light-colored suit and held a golden-headed cane. His head was covered in wavy gray hair, and he had bushy eyebrows and a close-cropped gray beard and mustache.

“Of course I speak English. I am English,” the man said. “David Lovejoy at your service. Exporter of the exotic to the lands of the English-speaking people. And who might you be? A sailor off one of the British frigates out there? You hardly look hearty enough to be a sailor. How old are you?”

“I’m nineteen, sir. My name’s Sten. I’m a sailor and officer crew server on the British frigate, the HMS Imperieuse.”

“So, you’re a cabin boy to the Royal Navy,” the man said, adding, “Sweet,” in a knowing tone when Sten didn’t deny performing that role. The man evidently had an idea of the functions of a cabin boy of Sten’s age and looks in the Royal Navy. And he wasn’t wrong.

Lovejoy was dipping into his pocket and pulling out banknotes in some currency Sten had never seen before. He had no idea how much he was being shown. He did have an idea why, though. The man had put a possessive hand on his buttocks.

“You cannot be roaming the streets of Tripoli by yourself, lad. You need to be somewhere safe. There’s a hotel, the Bin Zikri, close to hand that caters to Europeans. I will feed you a dinner there. Come with me.”

In fairness to Lovejoy, Sten had a very good idea what the man wanted to give him in the hotel in addition to dinner and he went with him anyway. The young man knew the look the man gave him. He definitely knew the meaning of a hand pressing possessively on his rump and the offer of money.

Lifting his cane in front of him, obviously well-versed in clearing a path through a Tripoli crowd with it, Lovejoy applied a strong grip on Sten’s arm, and without asking for the young man’s assent, propelled them both out into the narrow street.

Lovejoy fucked Sten on the bed in a well-appointed bedroom at the Bin Zikri. The young man, naked, was on his knees on the mattress at the foot of the bed, his chest and cheek pressed into the damask bed cover, gazing out of an open door onto a stone balcony and at a slim tower he didn’t know was a minaret, framed by the tops of palm trees. The mysterious cacophony of the Arab street drifted up from below, while in the room, David Lovejoy, standing behind him, was mounted on his ass, grasping the young man’s hips between his hands, and grunting and fucking.

Local currency banknotes were strewn on the bed near Sten’s head, testimony to the willingness with which the young man was lying under Lovejoy and had bared his ass to the man.

Before Lovejoy had put Sten in the position of the dog, he’d laid the young man on this back at the foot of the bed and hovered over him, fondling, kissing, and licking Sten everywhere—gliding over every curve, exploring every crevice. Sucking and stroking the young man’s cock, while penetrating him with one, two, and then three fingers, opening the young man up, making him beg for the cock. Sten came the first time before Lovejoy put the young man on his knees and elbows and covered, mounted, and entered him.

No one on the ship had used and worshipped the young sailor’s body as fully as this man did. Conversely, Sten responded to Lovejoy so yieldingly that the man had no question that the young man regularly took cock and would take his.

As old as he was—Sten assuming the man was ancient when he probably wasn’t far out of his early forties—Lovejoy had admirable stamina. He wasn’t especially long or thick, but he knew how to work Sten’s passage to pull moans and groans out of the young man, to kiss and rub the sailor’s passage walls to coax the muscles of the walls to ripple over the hard shaft as he set up a steady rhythm and then made Sten groan by going off rhythm for a couple of beats.

Lovejoy maintained control, spinning out the fuck for a long time. When Sten felt the man tense and begin to tremble, Lovejoy held Sten still. As he brought himself back into check, he ran his hands over the young man’s body and kiss him on the back of his neck and down between his shoulder blades. As he did so, a hand came around Sten’s belly, laced its fingers in the sailor’s balls and distended and rolled them, coaxing groans and murmurs of “Yes, yes, yes,” out of the young man that were truer than any Sten voiced for sailors on the ship as they fucked him.

Sten was brought off twice, panting hard and murmuring “Take it, get it. I’m going to . . .” before Lovejoy reached and went beyond his own endurance, holding Sten tight and pumping out cum deep in the young man’s passage. This wasn’t anything like the takings on the ship. Those were mostly hurried and furtive, the sailor having someplace else he should be, something else he should be doing. This man savored the taking—and took Sten completely.

When the man had come, he pulled out of Sten, slapped him on the rump, said, “So far so good,” and sauntered over to an en suite water closet. He had a small bag with him and stooped down and extracted from it some lengths of leather strapping and a small hand whip. At the door to the closet, he turned and said, “Go onto your back and open your legs wide for me. We will resume in a few minutes.”

When he was gone, Sten rolled off the bed, quickly pulled his clothes on, grabbed the banknotes that had been scattered on the bed, and quickly left the room. It wasn’t so much that he needed to get away from the older man—Lovejoy was an expert cocksman and he had fed him dinner and was willing to pay for the sex—but that the light outside was dimming. Sten needed to get back to the harbor and return to the Imperieuse. He didn’t know how long the man had been inside him, working his passage, but it seemed like hours, not only from how exhausted Sten was but also from the waning light. They had spent a lengthy time in the hotel’s dining room, Lovejoy introducing the young man to the exotic tastes of the Arabic world, but it seemed like it had taken days here on the bed for the man to complete his breeding.

And the man wanted to come back to the bed and do it again in a different position—and rougher, with restraints and a whip. These alone didn’t disturb Sten—much. The sailors on the Imperieuse had their rough sex fetishes as well.

The street was as congested as before when he left the hotel. He assumed that going down the incline of the street would get him to the harbor rather than going up. Within steps, though, he found that down led into a blind alley. He turned to go back up the street to find another way down to the harbor, but several pairs of hands reached out for him at the entrance of the dark alley. One hand went over his mouth to muffle his cries of protest as he was dragged deeper and deeper into the darkness.

* * * *

There were five of them, ruffians all, hard-bodied Arabs, in thawbs—the robes commonly worn in the region—but, not in the thawbs for long, as they dragged Sten through a door off the alley and into a small chamber, with one small barred window high on the wall and a beaten earth floor. They were stripped in no time, as Sten was, and with one man, in rotation, between the young man’s thighs and the other four holding him down, they fucked him one after the other. In a second round, they doubled him. They left him alone, lying in a heap, panting and moaning—but not as cowed as they most likely thought he was—for an hour or more, before returning and gang banging him again.

Before the night was spent, though, they had him bound at wrists and ankles and bundled into the bed of a cart and were wheeling him up to the top of the ridge, stopping at one of the large villas and old palaces at the top. They pounded on a door, which was opened, and a tall, gaunt Arab in a good-quality, sparkling white thawb came out, flanked by two burly bodyguards. His attention was directed to the bed of the cart to view the young, blond-haired European sailor curled up there. He nodded his head and directed the bodyguards to lift Sten from the cart and carry him into the villa. The man left for a moment, returned with a sack of money, paid the ruffians who had brought Sten there, and closed the door on them.

Where Sten was taken was a stark contrast from where he’d just come from. He was taken up several flights of stairs to a room at the top of the villa. There were still bars on the windows, but the windows were large and looked down into the sleeping city, bathed in full moonlight. The chamber was large as well, with a bathing pool in the middle of a marble floor of mosaic tiles. The walls, similarly were made of mosaic designs in various shades of marble, which, upon close look, depicted muscular young, naked men in sexual positions. The only furnishings in this section of room were a couple of sleeping couches on raised platforms around the pool.

The chamber was separated by marble columns into two sections. Beyond the section with the pool was a sexual workout chamber, with a cross-bar and various bondage machines, including stocks, tables with restraints, restraints on the walls, and tables holding ropes, whips, switches, and various penetration toys.

As Sten slowly recovered from having serviced Lovejoy and then five ruffians, attendants came into the chamber and worked on cleaning and pampering the young man’s body, putting him into the pool and scrubbing him and anointing him with oils and perfumes. As they worked, the tall man in the elegant thawb who had paid for Sten at the door on the street sat on the edge of one of the couches. He was a handsome man barring a distinct hawk nose. He was of middle age, tall and thin, with dark hair and eyes, and of assured bearing.

“My name is Jozef,” he said in a calm voice in accented English. “You are in the pleasure house of Sidi Haji Rahman. You belong to Haji now, who will visit presently to cover and assess you. No one can help you leave here. Your very survival depends on pleasing Haji now and then pleasing whatever men he sells your time to later for as long as you are of use to him. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Sten answered, fully aware of his position, at least for the moment.

“I will be your guide and your friend while you are here. You will want to please me as well as you please Haji. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Sten answered.

“You will be a courtesan here, an exotic one for the tastes of the men of Tripoli. Your survival will depend on how skilled, yielding, and resilient you are. I hope you understand and appreciate that. The more open to the cock you are and the more pleasure you can give men will determine how long you live and can do so in comfort. The men who brought you here said you were experienced with lying under a man. Is that so?”

“Yes,” Sten answered. He understood that this is what would benefit him in this situation.

“Very experienced?” the man asked. “Prepared to be yielding?”

“Yes,” Sten answered, honestly.

The man smiled, obviously pleased with this answer. He would have said more, as Sten stood at the side of the pool, dry now and perfumed and powdered, and now with gold chains, with tiny bells on his ankles and on his biceps, except the double doors to the chamber opened and a middle-aged, heavy-set Arab strode in, his thawb of the best material, shot through with gold threads. This undoubtedly was the master, Sidi Haji Rahman.

The man stopped by the pool, his eyes drinking in the small, nineteen-year-old blond American, standing there. “Magnificent. Beautiful,” he murmured. “He will—”

“I believe he understands what he is expected to do and will provide you good sport.”

“Very good. Put him on the couch, Jozef.”

As Jozef led Sten to one of the couches, attendants stripped the thawb off Haji, revealing a muscular man, gone to fat, but still powerful of body. His erection was massive; his belly fat wouldn’t hinder him in managing to sink deep into Sten’s passage. He strode over to the couch and reached down. Within moments he had touched and fondled Sten everywhere, expertly assessing the young man’s assets, which, from the sounds the man made, were all that he could hope for.

Playing his part, Sten stretched out, arms reaching out, chest pushed up, open and vulnerable to the man’s touch, moaning and panting and moving with the glide of the hands and penetration of the fingers. He raised his arms over his head, grabbing the top edge of the reclining couch, stretching his body out full, spreading his thighs to Haji’s touch, and raising one ankle to the Arab’s shoulder in a position of total surrender. He responded to the penetration of the fingers, moving his pelvis to slide on the digits. He moaned, but did not resist, as the fingers moved deeper inside him.

As Haji hummed in pleasure at the yielding of the young man, Sten murmured, “Nem, nem—Yes, yes,” in the only Arabic he’d learned thus far, adding, “Do what you want,” in English, which Haji recognized and awarded with an appreciative grunt. After lifting his mouth and tongue from the young man’s body, Haji stroked Sten off with one hand and penetrated him deep, up to the second knuckles, with the fingers of the other. Sten arched his back, rocked on the fingers, and moaned. For a few moments it seemed as if the Arab would bury his fist—and that Sten would in no way resist that—but he didn’t.

When Sten had come, Haji came up onto the couch on his knees, pressing them between the young man’s open thighs, put an arm under Sten’s waist, raising the young sailor’s pelvis to him, worked his cock inside Sten’s passage, and set up a rhythm of the fuck. Murmuring, “Yes, yes, yes,” and the bells on his ankles and biceps tinkling in his rocking movement of receiving and making love to the cock, Sten hugged the man’s hips with his knees, pressed his fingertips into the beefy man’s shoulders blades and moved in concert to Haji’s slow, deep thrusts.

Amazed as he was at the young man’s yielding, sensual response to the fuck, Haji groaned in pleasure when he discovered Sten was able to control his passage walls muscles to grip and undulate over the buried shaft, and the Arab gave up his seed before he had planned to. This was an accomplished whore his men had brought to him.

They lay there, panting, moving their hands over the other’s body until Haji recovered enough to harden again. He turned Sten onto his belly, the young man yielding all to him, encircled the lad’s waist again, lifted his hips off the surface of the couch, mounted and penetrated him, and fucked him again.

The second coupling went as well as the first one, and Sten had reason to think it was over and he’d passed muster with the master. But it wasn’t over.

After another period of rest, Haji rose off the couch, motioned to the two bodyguards who had brought Sten up to the chamber. The two came forward.

“Suspend him in the other chamber,” he said. He watched as the two bodyguards pulled Sten up from the couch, carried him into the second section of the chamber and suspended him from chains, his wrists bound, from the ceiling of the room.

Naked, Haji came into the chamber, picked up a hand whip, and as Sten whimpered, moaned, and occasionally involuntarily screamed in pain-pleasure, the motion of his body ineffectually trying to avoid the whip sending the bells on his ankles and biceps jingling, suffered briefly—but only briefly and without the full power of Haji’s strength behind the whip, the kiss of the lash.

“Take him down. Put him on the prie-dieu stocks,” Haji commanded. This device was in the form of a prayer bench, with Sten’s spread thighs lashed to the frame, his belly on the rail, and his arms hanging own the other side and strapped to the frame. Haji stood crouched over behind him, an ivory shaft in his hand, working it in Sten’s passage as the man regained his erection. When he had, he knelt behind Sten, penetrated him, grabbed a hank of blond hair, pulling Sten’s head back, and thrust and thrust and thrust to another breeding.

After Haji had left the chamber and Sten had been released from the bondage device, Jozef helped him over to one of the couches.

“He is very pleased,” he said. “You will be a favorite of the house.”

He lay the panting young man out his belly on the couch and rubbed the tightness out of Sten’s muscles. When he felt the young man relax and sigh, close to dozing off, Jozef pulled his thawb over his head, revealing a gaunt but hard-bodied muscular slender body. He moved over on top of the young man, put the bulb of his erection in place, grasped the youth’s wrists, forcing Sten’s arms over his head, sank his long, thin cock deep inside the young man’s passage, and fucked him hard.

* * * *

Sten would have been embarrassed to admit it, if asked, but, on the whole, he enjoyed the short time he spent in the pleasure house of Sidi Haji Rahman. He was sold to men no more than three times a week; visited by the expert cocksman, Haji, once or twice each week; and covered by Jozef, a lover, nearly every night that he wasn’t with a house client. He was given more rest time than he had been accorded on the Imperieuse, he was fed well, he was kept clean and pampered, and the sexual torture fetish aspect, open to any client who would pay for it, was not overused.

Not that he and the client didn’t visit the other section of the chamber nearly every time and employ one of the machines or that Sten wasn’t fucked bound. For what the clients were paying, they almost always went for something a little extra with the exotic blond young man, who was oh so yielding to their desires. But after fucking him by or in the pool, they had little stamina left for the more athletic taking with the aid of the bondage apparatuses, and few of them had the imagination to put Sten in an overly taxing position.

Still, in addition to being ridden on the couch and in the pool, he was bent over the prie-dieu stocks frame, suspended from the ceiling, put on the cross-bar, and even restrained against the wall, bound to the stone at the wrists, throat, and thighs, with his rump jutting out and the client holding his hips and fucking him from behind.

There generally were three couplings in an evening, three evenings a week. Each time there had been an auction attended by a couple of dozen men. Sten was one of three young men who danced on a stage before the gathered men in diaphanous veils, while the men ogled them and speculated. Then an auction was conducted for each of the young men, in succession, with Sten coming last. The top three bidders in each auction got an hour and a half with the young man they were bidding on. The high bid went first, when the youth was at his freshest. There was a full evening of taking and taxing for the young man followed by at least one day of rest—barring visits from Haji and the attentions of the youth’s guide—Jozef, in Sten’s case.

Only one client taxed Sten to the limit while he was at the pleasure house. David Lovejoy came to the auction one evening. Surprised at seeing Sten on the stage, dancing, he did what no other client had done before. He demanded the claim of all three sessions with Sten that evening if his bid came in at three times of the next man after him, which it did. Then, after exhausting Sten on the couch with his talent to go to the edge, drain Sten, and then back off on his own ejaculation until Sten was babbling and drained achingly dry, he took Sten to the other section of the chamber and used him on every apparatus that was there, whipping the young man until Sten’s screams of pain-passion reverberated through the old palace building.

“No one leaves me in the middle of my pleasure as you did in the Bin Zikri Hotel,” he had growled.

“It was late. I didn’t stay because I had to get back to the Imperieuse,” Sten whimpered.

“And yet you didn’t go back to the Imperieuse,” Lovejoy said.

Sten was too exhausted at that point to discuss it further.

Jozef and the bodyguards had to intervene when Lovejoy’s time was up with Sten stretched out on a rack-type table and Lovejoy on top of him, strapping the young man’s buttocks and fucking him hard.

Lovejoy left Sten curled up and babbling on the couch by the pool.

Two days later Sten was being bound at the wrists and ankles and carried down to a cart on the street.

“Why?” he asked Jozef plaintively in passing.

“You have been sold to a client,” was Jozef’s explanation. “This may be a good thing,” he added, his voice not giving the least bit of assurance that it was. Clients who normally bought the young men from the pleasure house used them more roughly and more quickly terminally than the pleasure house did.

The villa to which Sten was carted was also at the top of the town. It was smaller and not as well appointed as the pleasure house. He was carried up to a room at the top of the building, just as where the room had been that Jozef had told him was part of the harem complex of an old palace. This room, like the other, with a pool at one end, and a section with sex bondage apparatuses at the other end, quite possibly had once been a harem as well. The room had windows overlooking the city, windows with strong bars on them.

Sten was standing at one of the windows, looking down into the Tripoli harbor and beyond, to where the Imperieuse and other fighting vessels of the allied nations were at anchor, and thought once again and the likelihood he’d ever serve on the Imperieuse again. That was highly unlikely. No one in his family knew where he was. They didn’t even know the name he was going by now. And those on the Imperieuse would just think that he had taken his first opportunity to escape impressment and would never be recovered.

He was on his own, responsible for himself and his own survival.

He heard the double doors out to the corridor opening and he turned in that direction. A glowering David Lovejoy stood in the doorway. He was wearing a robe, but nothing else. The robe was open to reveal that he was in hard erection. He hands were being held in front of him, cradling the strands of a hand whip.

“We begin again,” he growled.