Tangier Season

Yorkshire, England, Late Summer, 1890

I felt the sting on my thigh and looked up to see that William had ridden up beside me and struck at me with his riding crop. I turned and twisted in the saddle and when he struck me again it was on the chest. Laughing, I gave my own horse the lash and its head and we were riding over the pastureland of Falconcroft, the castle hovering on the rise above the rolling terrain, me slightly in the lead and William behind me.

I made for a stand of trees down by where the river laced through the Harkwoods’ Yorkshire country estate and pulled up there, well inside the cover of the foliage. William rode up beside me, embraced me with one arm, his hand gripping the back of my neck and pulling me up from the saddle. He was florid, in heat. His face loomed in front of me, and he took my mouth in his in a brutal kiss. He bit me on the lip, raising a trickle of blood at the corner of my mouth. “Enough of the teasing,” he commanded. Three times more the crop struck at my ass, pulled up from the saddle, as he forced his tongue inside my mouth again in a breathtaking kiss.

Pulling away from him, I was off again, across the fields, headed toward one of the remote horse barns on the property hidden in a fold of a gully below and just out of sight of the castle. William was in pursuit, but my horse was faster and I was younger and lighter. I got to the barn before he did and had time to dismount, pull the saddle off the horse, and release the horse into the enclosed pasture by the barn before turning and entering the dimly lit building. William must have done the same with his horse when he reached the barn, as when he entered, he was carrying the saddle from his horse.

I had used the time to pick out a spot, a hay bale back in the shadows--I agreed that the time for teasing was past and I welcomed what was to come--but William obviously had a contrary idea. He lifted and set his saddle on top of a five-foot slatted wooden partition between two horse stalls and then turned and advanced on me. He was between me and the door to the barn, but that didn’t mean much to me. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. It would have been useless to struggle against him even if I intended to do so, which I didn’t. He was taller and bulkier than I was--he had me by a good sixty pounds and fifteen years.

I did, teasingly, try a feint around him to the open barn door, but he caught me with a lash of his riding crop on my chest, and when I staggered, he grabbed and pulled me to him, taking me into another possessing kiss. I opened to him immediately, returning the kiss hungrily as he grabbed at my balls through the thin material of my riding breeches. I gasped as he squeezed them--squeeze and release, squeeze and release. He slapped me hard across the mouth, threw me to the ground, and struck at me twice more with the riding crop. There wasn’t enough force behind the blows of the crop to be damaging. They were more a declaration of domination--an intent to take; an intent to take hard.

It was clear that my role in this was to be the whimpering, helpless submissive--not a role I usually played, but I was in high heat for the man. I wanted something different as a bottom than I wanted as a top. Few men aroused the need in me to bottom for another man. This man did.

Moaning, I attempted to curl up into a ball but he was leaning down, pulling me up, throwing me over his shoulder, and marching to the wall where he had hung his saddle. He easily lifted my body and set my belly down on the saddle, my torso draped over one side and my legs hanging down on the other. I didn’t fight it. My role was to submit.

Somewhere he had come up with leather straps. He came around to the front of me, grabbed my wrists, one after the other, and tied them down on the wooden slats of the wall below me.

“Please don’t,” I murmured, with a whisper, knowing he wanted me to beg that much and knowing that he’d just laugh, which he did.

On the other side of the stall, he jerked off my boots and then my riding breeches and underdrawers. He tied off my ankles on that side of the wall as he’d done with my wrists on the other side. I, of course, lay there, limp, trembling for him, murmuring empty objections, but letting him have his way.

He hit me repeatedly on the bare buttocks with the riding crop, and I groaned and cried out with each sting of the lash, writhing as best as I could. Embarrassingly, though, I was crying for the lash as much as against it and begging him to fuck me. I subsided into moans and gasps as his mouth and fingers went to opening up and preparing my ass. I relaxed my anus and passage, as I well knew how to do, and opened quickly to him. I hoped it was enough, and it proved to be. He was vigorous but not oversized. I had taken champion cocks from bruising men.

Climbing the slatted partition with hands and feet on either side of my draped body, he set his feet in the opening in the slats near the top of the wall, worked his cock inside me as I both cried out at the violation and begged him to go deeper. Riding my ass high, like we were in a race for the gold, and he the jockey and me the thoroughbred, he rose and fell on my ass, lashing away at my rump and thighs with his riding crop, picking up speed, depth, and intensity. He was experienced. Size didn’t prove to be an issue. He both knew to give the prostate extra attention and how to kiss all sides of the channel walls as he stroked in long, hard, cruel thrusts.

We both trumpeted our coming, he deep inside me and me against the saddle. I whimpered and sighed as he dismounted and kissed my blushing buttocks repeatedly and ran his fingers over the welts he had raised there. He then untied my wrists and ankles, said, “Cheerio. You’re a jolly good lay. I enjoyed that. No more teasing now,” and strode out of the barn.

I lay there, stretched over the saddle, for a few moments more, both moaning at and reveling in the forceful taking. I only rarely played the submissive, but this was well worth the ride. The American author and composer had seemed more diffident than this earlier, and I’d thought that my teasing would lead to me being dominant. But he proved to be a firecracker and to know just the right parameters of pain and pleasure that would excite me.

Groaning, I pulled myself down from the wall, gingerly pulling on my underdrawers, riding breeches, and boots after carefully running my hands over the welts that weren’t too bad and probably would disappear before we all had to gather in the drawing room before supper. Still, there would be a memory of this afternoon in the sting I’d still feel in sitting at the dining table. When I got to the door of the barn, William Bowles was covering the distance between the barn and the main house of Falconcroft, a great pile of Gothic stone appended to a medieval castle keep, at the top of the rise. He was flicking his riding crop against his leg as he jauntily walked along. I moaned at the remembrance of the dominance and slight cruelty of the man I’d only known since the formal and tame luncheon on the lawn earlier in the day. I wondered how he knew I’d take and harden for the lash and lie under him.

* * * *

“I urge you to accept your uncle’s invitation to be his secretary for the season in Tangier. I don’t like what I hear coming from London these days.” Lady Cybil, Lord Harkwood’s sister and, not incidentally, my mother, had pulled me to the side of the drawing room during cocktails before dinner. She was looking very distraught, and I wanted nothing more than to assure her.

“He asked as soon as I arrived this morning,” I answered. “And of course I said yes. It’s very generous of him. The salary is more than satisfactory.”

“Good. He’s as steady as they come, is Sydney,” she said. “He will be a good influence on you, and Tangier should be far enough from London.”

For enough from London for what. But, ah, then the London gossip had reached out to Yorkshire, I thought. Who would have thought that such news would travel so far so fast. I’d only been with the group for a few months now. I could see why Mother was worried. I didn’t want her to be. Life had been rough for her these last two years. Widowed--tragically--she now was living almost full time under her brother’s wing here at Falconcroft. I had still been at Oxford when my father shot himself. It was publicized as a gun-cleaning accident, of course, but everyone knew better. He’d gone bankrupt, having put all of his money into trying to develop what they called a motor car, a somewhat noxious, in many regards, notion that had had no place in England at the close of the nineteenth century. Let the Americans drive down that rat hole, many here said, and I must say I agreed with them.

My relations with my father always had been strained. I worshipped him, of course. He was a handsome man, as all Wilsons were, and perfectly formed, and, I can openly think about it now, massively endowed--as all Wilsons undoubtedly were. But he was an angry man, fast to use the cane. Where many would remember moments of affection from their father, I remember moments of the cane. As I moved into puberty I, surprisingly, found that the cane made me go hard. But those were moments, at least when he paid attention to me. I confess that I sometimes committed sins just for the attention it got me from my father. When I got older and he was still using the cane, I realized that it made him hard too. In that regard, I felt I had a certain amount of control over his emotions.

When I was sent off to public school, I endured the cane rather less--in contrast to most of my fellow students--than I did at home. Perhaps the combination of the man I worshipped and his use of the cane was responsible for . . . but there was no need to dwell on that--especially there, in the drawing room, where I was grateful that men stood while women were permitted to sit. I had not completely recovered from a smarting ass, thanks to William Bowles, who was standing across the room and guffawing with my uncle.

“Perhaps when you’re in Tangier you will catch your uncle’s archaeology bug,” my mother went on to say. “That’s a noble pastime.”

What she meant was that she didn’t like what I was up to London, which it was obvious now that she’d had reports of. It wasn’t just Oscar and Alfred and Robert, or Bosie and Robbie, as I knew the latter two as. It was the whole arts thing. Oscar--Oscar Wilde--of course was the anchor of our little group. Robbie and Bosie, Robert Ross and Lord Alfred Douglas, nearly the same age as I was, were the major spokes from Oscar’s hub, even closer in with Oscar than I and a few others were. It was all quite tidy. I fucked Robbie and Bosie, and Oscar fucked us all. And he didn’t just physically fuck us; he fucked us with his witty prose as he rode our asses.

Assuaged, Mother drifted away and Uncle Sydney, with William Bowles and a very pregnant, small, mousey-looking woman in tow, moved in my direction.

“There you are, Gregory,” Lord Harkwood said as he approached. He was a very hardy soul, was my mother’s brother. A good bit older than mother and the issue of a different wife, he was florid, large boned--ever moving toward, but not quite at, obesity. Even at something past fifty, his hair was flaming red and his manner was what could be termed an amused gruffness. In other words, the classical country squire. He spoke in louder decibels than anyone else in the room, probably the result of a refusal to wear a device that would enhance his faltering hearing. He wasn’t a soft man, by any means. Although heavy, he was more muscle and gristle than fat, a man who obviously spent most of his time in the outdoors engaged in one blood sport or the other.

In contrast, the man he was shepherding over to me was the perfect university don type. He was even dressed the part, his dinner tux looking awkward on his body to the point of hiding how well I now knew his body was fashioned. The horn-rimmed glasses he wore and the diffident nature he was exuding emphasized the isolated scholar impression he made.

“I wish you to meet William Bowles, the novelist and composer. He’s from America, but he married locally. This is my nephew, Gregory Wilson,” Lord Harkwood said as he pulled Bowles toward me with a beefy hand on his forearm.

“It’s Billy, call me Billy,” Bowles said, as he looked at me as if nothing had happened that afternoon.

“Oh, we’ve met already,” I said and was gratified to see the trace of concern rush across Bowles’ face. He no doubt wondered if I’d expose him here in civilized company. He had told me “no more teasing,” but could keep him guessing. “At luncheon,” I added, putting the man out of his misery. “You were off at your golf club, Uncle. Luncheon was laid out on the lawn. It was very nice.” And later I was laid in the barn, I thought--which also was very nice. “We even rode together this afternoon.” At least Billy rode me.

“You ride?” Lord Harkwood said, turning to Bowles and perhaps wondering that a man such as Bowles was presently presenting spent any time outside a library at all.

“Yes, I do,” Bowles responded.

To which I couldn’t resist adding, “And he rides really well. He’s an excellent rider. And he is an expert with the crop.”

Bowles gave me a little smile, sharing now in the double entendre, realizing no doubt that I had no intention of giving him away. I was having too much fun.

“Oh, and his wife, Patricia,” Lord Harkwood said, pulling the bulbously pregnant little woman forward.

“I didn’t know Billy was married,” I said, trying to keep the acid in my voice for Bowles’ recognition only and trying my best not to append “to a woman” to that sentence. I wasn’t having quite as much fun now. “I didn’t see her at lunch.”

“She went to her parents’ house first, in the village,” Bowles quickly explained.

“And do you engage in riding as well?” I asked, turning to Bowles’ wife and trying to keep a straight face. Considering the bulge of her stomach, unless Bowles was being cuckolded, she was fully engaged in riding with him.

“Yes, of course. But not just now, as you can see.”

“So Billy has to do his riding with someone else for the present,” I said.

“It would appear so,” Patricia said, and we all politely laughed.

Before I could think of a way to torture Bowles further, the village vicar came over. “Patricia, I’d like you to meet Dr. Sturbridge. He’ll be following your progress.”

“I would like to meet him too. I’ll come with you,” Bowles said. Then, with a bow to Lord Harkwood and a shot of his own at me, “I enjoyed our ride this afternoon; I look forward to being able to do it again--perhaps on more vigorous terrain next time,” he was gone.

The dinner gong rang, but before we went in, my uncle said to me, “You didn’t bring your man John with you. Will you need one of my footman to dress you?”

“I managed for dinner, but, yes, that would be helpful,” I answered. “Charles has served me before. Perhaps--”

“Then Charles it will be,” Lord Harkwood said, as we paired up in traditional order to go in to dinner.

We ate in the family dining room, but the room still seemed cavernous for our group of ten. The top of the table was adequately lit by candelabras on the table top and hanging from the ceiling, but the light was dimmer below that, which, in my case hid a certain amount of sin. The table could easily accommodate twenty. Lord and Lady Harkwood took up the opposing ends, as was fitting. They were a warring couple. Margery Lady Harkwood was tall, dark, thin, quiet, spare of speech, and hawkish to Lord Sydney Harkwood’s florid robust blustering. Margery was American. Her family was floating in manufacturing money, which had made her the savior of Falconcroft from the land tax. The two did get along, but best at the nearly forty feet that separated them now at the table.

I was seated at Lord Harkwood’s left, with Billy Bowles on the other side of me. My mother was sitting across from me, on her brother’s right. The lord filled me in on the rest of the guests. Seated next to Bowles was his wife, Patricia, and then her father, the vicar. That explained a bit, I realized, which Billy confirmed to me in conversation. Patricia was from here and had returned here to give birth at her parents’ home. Billy wouldn’t be here for the birth, although he didn’t tell me where he’d be.

I knew where he wanted to be, though. During the meal, he periodically--when the three footmen weren’t serving us--placed his heel on top of my foot in the darkness under the table and ground it in, reminding me what he could be when he wasn’t acting the role of shy professor. When the footmen were serving us, he pulled away. As counterpoint, when Charles was serving me, I gave him a special smile and brushed his sleeve with mine as he hovered over me. Charles had been raised and trained at Falconcroft. He was a year and a half younger than my twenty-one years, but we had been playmates when I visited Falconcroft and had made some discoveries of life together. In the last year, the play had become quite intimate. I, of course, always took the lead and played from on top.

Dr. Sturbridge, the village doctor, was seated on Margery’s left, with the vicar’s wife beside him, and then, between her and my uncle, sat my mother.

As with any semiformal meal in one of the big country houses, this meal was replete with landmines, most of which burst below the surface and were not openly acknowledged.

“Nephew Gregory here has agreed to serve as secretary for me this season in Tangier,” Harkwood announced to the table.

“Has he?” Margery said, looking up sharply. “You hadn’t told me you were taking the fall in Tangier again, Sydney.”

“I always take the season in Tangier,” the lord answered back. “I hate late fall in England. You know that, Margery.”

“I think it’s wonderful Gregory will be going with Sydney,” my mother piped up. “He needs to get away from London, and Sydney will be such a good influence on him--and the chance to see exotic Tangier. He’ll learn a lot there.”

“Will he?” Margery said, this time looking pointedly at my mother. I wondered what Margery had heard about Tangier. I certainly had heard about Tangier. I was somewhat surprised my uncle went there, but then the archaeological dig that he had a firman--an authorizing document--for was there, west of Tangier, a temple to Apollo, so that would explain that.

“Yes, I think the study of archaeology will be so much better than what he’s been engaging in in London,” my mother said. Then she clamped her mouth shut as if she’d said what she was thinking too openly.

“In exotic Tangier?” Margery asked. I could hear a snort in her voice, but she too didn’t press the subject further.

“Oh, you live in London?” the vicar asked, looking down the table at me. That was quite disconcerting at the moment--being addressed by a vicar, when, between course services, Bowles’ hand was in my lap, covered by the darkness under the table, and he was crushing my nuts with his fist. He already had had me panting by tracing my engorging cock through the material of my crotch. “What is it you do there?” the vicar continued.

“I’m studying poetry and putting my hand to some playwriting,” I answered, trying not to make my voice show the exquisite pain of the strain being put on my balls--or go up two octaves from Billy’s attempt to castrate me. Mercifully, Billy took his hand away, as the footmen were appearing bearing the next course.

“Ah, you have a mentor there?” the doctor chimed in. “I hear the arts scene in London is quite lively at the moment.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but my mother hijacked a conversation that was getting too close to what she wanted avoided. “I hear an art exhibit is being added to the village fall faire this year, Dorothy.” She was addressing the vicar’s wife, who had been given an opening to discuss the faire and the part that Lord and Lady Harkwood could take in that this year. “Well, Lady Harkwood will be there, I guess. I guess you will be off on your dig, Lord Harkwood.”

Billy turned to me and said, in sotto voce, “Do you think anyone will notice we’re gone if we slip out of our chairs and I fuck you under the table? Would you make too much noise when I was inside you? Would you make more noise if I fucked you with my fist?”

How could he look so harmlessly bookish and yet be so sensually bold?

“Behave,” I muttered, prying at his hand that was squeezing my balls again, but he had a death grip on them, and I wound up relaxing the tension in my legs, letting them spread more, giving him a stronger grip on my nuts and the root of my cock, and just covering his hand with mine in surrender to him.

“Yes, I’ll be doing some digging,” Lord Harkwood answered the vicar’s wife, all smiles.

“I want to do some digging too,” Billy whispered.

“Keep it up and you won’t get the chance again,” I hissed.

“I have no trouble keeping it up,” he shot back.

Luckily the glazed eyes of everyone else were turned toward a prattling vicar’s wife. The plans for the faire carried them through the rest of dinner and out of the minefield. As the dessert arrived, a pudding flambé, which added light to the scene, Bowles released my balls and had both hands above the table, all innocence, as Charles came by to serve us.

While the vicar’s wife rattled away happily over the coffee, Billy Bowles’ heel came down on my foot again and he murmured, sotto voce, “As I hear it Oscar Wilde is your mentor--in the arts and other matters.”

“Yes,” I answered. “But where did you? . . . we do try to be discreet.”

“I do get to London fairly often. Oscar’s activities are not nearly discreet enough--although not as flamboyant as Robert Ross and Alfred Douglas are being. This will come to a head sooner than later. You will be fortunate to be well away from it--not that Tangier is away from it in some respects.”

“I believe I am discreet enough,” I countered. “I have women too in London. I fuck women.”

“Bully for you. Don’t we all? Wilde is married as well and father of two, and he is headed for trouble anyway. It’s the modern way with the privileged, you know. Did you know that your uncle has a mistress in London--an actress?”

“What if he does? Men have had mistresses as far back in time in England as can be recorded, and not just men of privilege. Take a look at Margery. You would have a mistress too, wouldn’t you, if you were married to her? I’m not sure why that’s relevant.”

“Ah, well, I’ll not be the one to enlighten you, then. But where you are concerned, I also, in case you wonder, know Harold Mackelvoy.”

“And you care because?” I asked. So that’s how he knew I’d be so easy to approach in the way that Bowles had approached me this afternoon, I thought. Not just Oscar, but more specifically Harold Mackelvoy. Mackelvoy was a thug, a prize fighter in the grimmest part of London, who knew Wilde in some unknown connection. The point here was that Mackelvoy was who I went to when I was in the mood to be bruised and taken hard. He was a master of the whip and cane. Obviously he had told Bowles what I liked as a submissive. Knowing that he’d approached me with the knowledge of what I’d let him do didn’t lessen my concern that I had enjoyed it as I had--and that I wanted him again.

“I care because I want another crack at you myself. And another one after that,” Bowles muttered. He put his hand on my thigh briefly and squeezed. I’m sure he could feel me tremble under his touch. I wanted the hand on my crotch again.

“Your wife . . .”

“Is perfect camouflage.”

“The baby?”

“Yes, I fucked it into her. You didn’t ask, but this is our third one--in as many years. She can’t get enough of me in bed. Are you jealous? You can’t get enough of me, either, can you?”

I didn’t respond, so he continued. “She will be here for the next several months--with all of the children--and I won’t. I can come to London.”

“As you heard, I’m going to Tangier.”

“That’s not an obstacle. And there’s tonight. My wife is going to her parents’, to be with our other children. I’m not. I’m leaving for London from here tomorrow.”

I was going to ask what he meant by that, but Lord Harkwood was standing up from the table. It was time for the men and women to part and for the men to withdraw to the smoking room, with Billy and me going to opposite corners of the room. I suddenly was afraid of him--and afraid of myself with him. I had bought into separating from my loose life in London, which I could see was getting riskier as well as anyone else could see, and going off under the watchful eye of my staid uncle.

That night, I stood by the bed, as Charles undressed me.

“You came without your valet,” he said.

“Yes, I have,” I answered. I hadn’t been able to tell my uncle that John no longer was with me. At the first whiff of scandal floating through London society, he’d asked for references and deserted me. I couldn’t blame him. I could “chin up” the innuendo; a valet couldn’t risk it unless he wanted to be painted with the same brush as his master. The two had to be intimate. As the master went so went the valet, was the conventional wisdom. “I wanted you to do for me,” I added.

He was trembling and had gotten down to where I was just wearing my underdrawers.

“You have continued being very active, sir, I can see.” He was complimenting me, I knew, on how toned I’d kept my body.

“You have as well. The underdrawers too, if you please, Charles.”

He went down on his knees to pull them to the floor. “Will there be anything else?” he asked, looking up into my eyes.

“You know there is,” I said. I was in half erection, which in my case, was something to behold. I reached down and pressed my cock against his cheek. Charles turned his head and opened his mouth over the shaft and began to suck it.

Fifteen minutes later he was under me on the bed, on his back, with a pillow under the small of his back and me lying between his spread legs, my cock a good five inches up inside him.

“You’re tight. You’re not giving it all to me. Open to me,” I commanded.

“You are so big. I don’t know if I can . . . oh, god. Oh, Fuck!”

I gave all of it to him, hard and deep, in three thrusts, and then pulled back as he was so tight it pained us both. He collapsed under me, with a moan. “Relax, open to me! Not so tight,” I repeated, more soothingly this time.

Like a series of gates to the city opening in quick succession to accommodate a battering ram and avoid being shattered, the tension flowed out of him and his walls gave way. He groaned and moaned as I slid thick and deep inside him, and when I began to pump, he gripped my hips and moved with me--remembering as I did how we’d learned to do this together and had once perfected the rhythm of the fuck.

I fucked him slowly, tenderly, humming to him as he grimaced but told me with his eyes and murmured, “Yes, yes, yes, fuck me,” to continue. He arched his back and alternated between clutching my shoulder blades and my buttocks, holding me close to him with his fingernails buried in my butt cheeks when I was pressing deep inside him, opening up new inches of his channel, and moving his hands back to my shoulder blades and moaning the want of the taking when I withdrew to rubbing his prostate with my bulb. He suffered at the beginning, from the size of me, so I frequently held for him to open more, but slowly his groans and grimaces melted into moans and sighs of passion, allowing me to stroke faster and deeper.

We kissed deeply and I moved my lips down his throat to latch onto his nipples, one after the other, and give them suck. I waited for him to beg for intensity and then I went hard, deep, fast, rocking the bed while he urged me to take him completely, fully, to heaven.

We moved in concert like the long-term lovers that we had been before I had moved more permanently to London, the groaning of the bed springs music to our ears. What I wanted, what I gave, as a top was far different from what I wanted as a bottom. Charles was the more tender lover of my awakening years; he wasn’t the cruel father figure I longed to submit to.

As I creamed him deep with a muted victory exclamation, my peripheral vision focused on movement over by the door into my bed chamber. I caught a glimpse of Billy Bowles, in a dressing gown, at the open door. He took in what was happening on the bed, clicked the door shut, and was gone. I shuddered at the realization that he had had a cane in his hand along with leather straps that could be used as restraints.

“Sir, oh, sir,” Charles murmured. His hand was encasing his cock, and his cum was gobbed on my belly.

“Shh, shh,” I said. “Feel it? I’m hardening again. I’ve missed you, Charles.”

“Oh, sir. Oh, OH!”

I had started to pump him again--slow, steady, deep.

Charles obviously couldn’t stay the night. His day would start in a matter of just a few hours. I watched him redress in the light of a candle on my nightstand and walked him to the door to the corridor when he was dressed. We kissed and I stood in the doorway, holding the candle, as he slipped up the backstairs to the servants’ rooms in the attic. When I turned to go back into my chamber, I saw that there was a light further down the hall. Billy Bowles. He was just in a dressing gown, as was I. I expected him to come down the hall toward me, and I would have received him in my room if he had. Instead, he gave me an expectant look, turned, and walked toward the main staircase.

I followed him. He descended the stairs, holding his candle, and moved into the family dining room. I descended the staircase as well and entered the dining room. His candle was sitting on the dining room table, but I didn’t see him. I placed my candle next to his and turned, to find him standing close behind me, his dressing gown open, his cock in full erection. He had brought the cane and the leather straps.

He bent me over Lord Harkwood’s chair at the table--sideways, so that I straddled one arm with my chest and the closer one with my belly. He tied my wrists to the chair legs on the other side from where my feet were on the carpet. I remained silent throughout the binding other than whimpering low with my eyes on the cane laying on top of the table. My dressing gown was gone, the sash was cruelly tightened around my head, gagging my mouth.

I moaned as he commenced caning my bare buttocks, thighs, and back. For some minutes the only sounds in the room were the swishing and crack of the cane, my gasps and moans as my body jerked within its confining bindings, and Billy’s heavy breathing. I went immediately hard as steel and throbbing. When he had tired of beating me with the cane, he slapped his hard cock on my buttocks for several strokes and rubbed the underside of it up and down in my butt crease and repeatedly across my anus, which was open and begging for him.

He gripped my hips and put his bulb in me, but just that, and I heard him give a low, hoarse laugh as I pushed up on my toes, raising my buttocks to take in three or so more inches of him. I was aching for the cock and fully open for what he could provide. He grabbed the hair on the back of my head and bowed me painfully back to him, arching my torso and stretching my arms to the limit the bindings would permit. As he did that he slammed his cock deep up inside me. He withdrew and trust up into me again to the hilt--then a third time. He suspended the anal assault there, untied me, pulled me under the dining table onto my back and, coming down on his knees between my spread legs, grabbed my buttocks in both hands, elevated them to his desired angle of thrust, fed all of the cock into me again, and fucked me as he had said earlier he wanted to do--under the dining table.

Groaning, but thoroughly aroused, at the churning of his cock inside me and from the sting of the caning of my tender flesh, I leveraged off my feet and met his thrusts with counterthrusts of my own. Clutching his undulating buttocks with my hands, I helped intensify the velocity of his up thrusts, taking him as deep as he was able to get. He jerked, gave a little cry, and came inside me, after which he released the sash gag and possessed my mouth brutally with his. I had already ejaculated while he was caning me bent over the chair, but when he rolled off of me to the side, latched onto one of my nipples with his teeth, and entered my ass with two fingers to rub my prostate, I quickly masturbated myself to a second, arcing coming. I could have come again and again under his cruel attentions. He hadn’t so much satiated me, as he had set me afire.

He abandoned me there, on the floor under the table, to recover, and the door to his bed chamber was shut tight when I had struggled, wincing from the caning, back to my own chamber. I had thought to spend the night under him either in his bed or mine, but I tried his door and it was locked.

When I came down for breakfast in the morning, a couple of suitcases were in the front hall. Before I reached the dining room, I heard Sydney and Billy talking and laughing. Bypassing breakfast, not wanting to face both of the men while eating breakfast on the table I’d so recently been assaulted under, I walked out of the house and down through the gardens.

Not wanting to face Billy in Lord Harkwood’s presence didn’t mean that I wasn’t keyed up still. I had remained hard for the rest of the night and tossing in my bed. Masturbation hadn’t satisfied me. I wanted more.

As I had done whenever I visited Falconcroft in the last few years, I sought out the gardener, Thomas. An ugly, gnarled, but muscular, man in his mid fifties--always sweaty, always with dirt under his fingernails, never cowed by rank, always randy. He was ever crude and illiterate other than knowing and using more dirty curse words than anyone else I’d ever met. He also had a longer and thicker cock than I did and had, over the past three years, laid me wherever he found me alone--in his cottage, under trees or bushes, in his wheelbarrow, on the bank of the ornamental pond.

From the moment he saw the interest and ache for it in my eyes he had fucked me without leave and as if by right. I didn’t have to make the decision to lie with men. He made it for me and nearly ruined me that first time, showing me no quarter. I had Charles first, but Thomas had already had me first. He reamed me in repeated fuckings of that thick cock of his and toughened me to be able to take any man in London. He always reminded me of my natural place in a pecking order established by a more realistic standard than title heredity. There were few men who knew what I wanted when I bottomed. He was one of them. He had trained me to want it that way.

And he was cruel. When I was in need as I now was, I knew I could come to him for relief.

We were on his bed by a window in his cottage near the front gates of Falconcroft when the carriage taking Billy to the train station to catch the morning train to London rolled by. As I watched the carriage wheel its way past the window, my wrists were tied together behind my back by a leather strap, my cheeks still smarted from Thomas slapping me into submission, he was gripping my waist, he was ramming my channel up and down on his impossibly thick cock, and he was telling me in the most graphic terms how he was going to “bring Mr. Lauty Dah Lord of the Manor” down a notch and fuck the stuffing out of me doggy style on the floor when he’d gotten me warmed up in this position.

And then he did just that. And he caned me, with me on all fours, before he fucked me like a dog. It was Thomas who introduced me to the arousal of the cane. I have no doubt I had a father fixation on the man. I never came so prodigiously as I did under Thomas’ assault. Whenever he was caning me, images of my father raced through my mind.

Well, perhaps Billy Bowles had done that for me, as well. But Thomas had been there before him.

* * * *

Tangier, Morocco, Mid Fall, 1890

The coupling was hurried and it had taken godawful long to get her out of her fussy long-skirted dress, remove the bustle, and untie and free her of the corset. She kept urging me to hurry. I’d stripped without trouble and she was panting for me, her hands already having smoothed the rubber French Letter on my cock. I didn’t bother removing her knickers. The bodice unlaced so that I could free her breasts and there was a flap in front that I merely unbuttoned and pulled down. There wasn’t time to take her laced shoes off. Trysting with a lady of elegance in the waning years of the nineteenth century was no easy task.

I laid her on her back on my narrow bed, over the lip that was there to prevent the pitching of the ship from rolling a body out of the bed. We were in my cabin in P&O’s Cadiz Star steamer that had brought us from Southampton to just beyond the harbor breakwater in Tangier, Morocco, our destination. We didn’t have time to spare, but Amelia had insisted on one last tryst before our arrival and possible forever separation.

It had been an enjoyable journey down the western coast of France to the entrance into the Mediterranean for me. I had a cabin separate from Lord Harkwood and thus could while my time away in any dalliances I found possible when he didn’t require my secretarial services. I had found it possible with the American, Amelia Anderson, whose somewhat scattered father obviously had trouble reining his daughter in. And I had found it with a young dining mess waiter named Yousef, who was returning to his home in Tangier and who voiced his wish to lie under me again there, as was possible.

“Hurry, hurry. You have me all aflame,” Amelia murmured breathlessly in a voice she must have placed in her mind from reading steamy Romance novels. “Christ, you are huge,” she then said in a voice she must have picked up in the London streets. She was holding me with both hands, guiding me to between her legs. I usually spent some time with my face there, sucking on her clit and tonguing in her folds, but we had no time for that today.

“I suppose you’ve had opportunities to compare,” I muttered, teasing her by rubbing my bulb against her clit.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, with a gasp, as she manipulated the sheathed cock herself to rub between her folds before moving it back to her clit. “It should be enough for you to know that you are among the biggest I’ve known.”

I didn’t have to wonder if Amelia had been with many men. She had seduced me. I hadn’t lied when I’d told William Bowles that I laid with women--I just didn’t do so often. Amelia had set her cap for me before we’d left Southampton. She’d been the one to supply the French Letters. She’d ridden my cock like a Gropecunt Lane whore.

“I don’t know if I can . . . Oh, Gregory, slower, my love . . .  oh, Oh, OH! Yess!”

I was on top of her, inside her, pumping her shallow and then pumping her deep--but not too deep. I was longer than she could comfortably take, but we’d done this enough for me to have her measure. I gave her exactly what made her moan, pant, and purr the most. I turned and sat on the side of the bunk, pulling her with me, holding her in my lap, skewered on my cock, raising and lowering her on the staff. My lips went to her exposed breasts and taut nipples. Whimpering and sighing, she went lip, relying on my arm around her waist to hold her in place on my lap. I moved the fingers of the free hand between us, search for and finding her clit, and rubbing it.

“Oh, Christ, Gregory!” she cried out as she came alive, writhed on my lap, took over the fuck by rising up and then slamming herself down on my cock, comfort no longer a concern for her, taking my full measure, and then exploded. She collapsed again, sighing and moaning. I took over again and pulled her up and down on the cock with more intense velocity and she exploded again--and then again. And then it was my turn.

The actual sex had taken no more than ten minutes. Unwrapping the package had taken that long and helping her to put herself back together had taken a good twenty minutes.

When we got out on deck, me checking the passageway outside my room first to ensure she wouldn’t be seen leaving my room, I was happy to see that we already were docking on the quay jutting out from the Tangier harbor and that all of the attention was pointed at the city marching up the hillside ahead, its white and ocher flat-roofed building shimmering in the sunlight.

I had wanted a last tumble with Yousef, whose ass was very sweet, but, looking up the deck, I saw him leaving my uncle’s cabin and turning and going in the other direction. He would have too many duties upon docking for me to fuck him again. He had given me his address in Tangier, but, of course, at this point it was all Arabic to me.

When I joined Amelia at the rail, she was standing next to her father, a great walrus of a man, to include the nature of his drooping mustache. I understood that he was some sort of super wealthy industrialist in the United States and was taking Amelia on a world tour--one that would allow them to dally here and there for months at a time--to celebrate her graduation from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts. If there was a mother alive, she had not been mentioned. Perhaps if there had been a mother and the father hadn’t seemed so dim, Amelia wouldn’t have been as forward and wanton as she was.

Certainly if she hadn’t been so forward with me, I wouldn’t have fucked her. She was all right, as a diversion, but Yousef was a much sweeter fuck.

I positioned myself on the other side of Mr. Anderson from Amelia. If I’d been beside her, I don’t think I could have trusted her not to touch me intimately. She was quite the wanton. She also was a beautiful young woman, with an hour-glass figure with or without the corset that I’d huffed and puffed to lace up when we’d done fucking. She had a deceptive blonde porcelain quality that must have come from her mother. Her father was course and crude, obviously a self-made businessman. But porcelain natured or not, she didn’t break. We proved that. And she sheathed a thick seven and a half inches without effort--although it sometimes was an effort for me not to give her the rest of it until she demanded it.

Yousef moaned at my penetration far more than she did, but then I routinely fed it all into him. Her nether lips were the fattest I’d ever parted with my cock on a woman, and, evidence of her wantonness, Amelia rouged them, saying she did it for my enjoyment. And I must admit that there was a little thrill in parting them with my cock, sinking into the core of her, feeling her shudder beneath and start to move her pelvis in the rhythm of the fuck. There was a certain arousal in feeling her tiny hands smooth the French Letter on my shaft as well. I didn’t use them with men.

Lord Harkwood joined us not long before the gangplank was set in place. As first-class passengers, we would be among the first to disembark. He and Mr. Anderson were exchanging farewells and comments of having enjoyed the journey in each other’s company, and indeed the two men had seemed to get along famously, which I was grateful for, because when they were sitting in the smoking cabin, puffing on their cigars, drinking their brandy, and sharing their stories of wealth and position, I had time to be with Yousef or Amelia.

“Yes, I enjoyed it immensely too,” Amelia was saying, looking at me with soft eyes across the massive belly of her father. “I could wish that it went on forever and ever.”

“We’re staying at the Hotel Continental until our villa is prepared,” Mr. Anderson said. “I don’t know where that is in the city, of course.”

“It’s right up there, in the Medina section, overlooking the harbor,” Lord Harkwood said, pointing it out for Amelia and her father.

“Gregory and I will be staying there tonight as well. I have business in the city before we go out to the Grottes d’Hercule area west along the coast, where my villa and dig are.”

“Well, perhaps we can meet for dinner this evening at the hotel then,” Anderson said.

“Yes, please, let’s do that,” Amelia said, giving me another pleading look. I could tell that the porcelain doll wasn’t finished with my cock yet.

I wasn’t really sure what I thought of that. It was a step in the right direction, of course, but sometimes I looked at Amelia and saw a consuming shark rather than a delicate-featured young woman of elegant style, short stature, and an hour-glass figure. Any man, of course, would be lucky to land her, not least because her father was filthy rich and I had been told she was an only child--a spoiled, headstrong child, however. If I hitched to her, I’m afraid there would be no question who would dominate. She even rode my cock more by her own choice than I laid her.

That weekend at Falconcroft, when William Bowles had cruelly and completely dominated and punished me, had become somewhat of a watershed for me. It wasn’t just that he scared me with his punishing domination or that I enjoyed it so much; it also was because of his warning about the increasingly public expression of Oscar, Robbie, and Bosie’s homosexuality. I took the offer to get away from all that by accompanying stodgy old Uncle Sydney to his archaeology project in the Mediterranean as a possible saving grace for me. Other than a couple of trysts with Charles and Thomas in the ensuing weeks before we took ship, I had been celibate and working on being normal, with normal appetites. I had to admit that the shipboard dalliances with Amelia were helping in that regard. I hadn’t returned to London. I hadn’t corresponded with William Bowles, and I had made every effort to relegate the memories of what melting things he did to my body out of my mind.

“Dinner together would be splendid, of course,” Lord Harkwood answered Amelia’s entreaty. “But it would be time for lunch when we disembark, and you two don’t know your way around the city. There are many acceptable cafés in the nearby market square, the Grand Socco. Perhaps we can share a lunch there also and I’ll have my man guide you to the hotel after that. Our luggage will already have been delivered to the Hotel Continental.”

“That sounds super,” Amelia said, once more seeking out my eyes with hers and, seeing that I was the only one looking at her, touching her breasts with her fingers enticingly.

“It’s settled then,” Lord Harkwood. “Hark, I believe that’s our signal to disembark.”

When I turned, I saw that Yousef was standing there, looking forlorn. Oddly enough, however, he seemed to be looking at my uncle’s departing figure rather than mine.

* * * *

“Well, look who we have here.”

I looked up from the café table in the Grand Socco, the central square of Tangier, in shock. “Billy!” I exclaimed.

“The one and only,” he said. “May I sit, although it looks like you two are just finishing up.”

“Of course you shall join us,” Lord Harkwood said, not seeming the least surprised to see William Bowles here. “In fact, perhaps you can be of service to us if you have the afternoon free.”

“I have whatever time free that I wish,” Bowles said, as he smiled and sat in the chair that Amelia had very recently vacated, her father and her having been ushered away by Uncle Sydney’s Tangier houseboy, Khalid, to the Hotel Continental. “What is it you wish me to do?” He had sat down right next to me and put his hand on my thigh under the surface of the table. I almost laughed, as Amelia had gripped me in the same spot before leaving for the hotel.

“I have business this afternoon I might as well take care of before leaving for the Grottes d’Hercule,” Lord Harkwood said. “It will save a trip into town. I have to renew my firman--my certificate of approval to excavate the temple site--before we can continue our work. That will take several hours, and I don’t wish to bore Gregory with the tediousness of it. If you are free, perhaps you can show him some of the town and return him to the Hotel Continental for supper. Perhaps you’ll join us for supper there.”

“I would be delighted to show Gregory the ropes,” Billy said, giving me a smile.

I shuddered. I’d been shown ropes by Billy before. And I soon was being shown them again.

“I’m surprised to see you here in Tangier,” I said when Uncle Sydney was gone. “I would have thought you’d be in York for the birth of your child.”

He had moved his hand to my crotch and was squeezing my balls again. I looked around to see if we’d been observed, but then I noticed that there were several pairings of older and younger men at the outdoor café. Most of the older men were European and the younger ones Arabic, but there were pairings the other way around too. One couple even was kissing. I recalled then that Tangier was known as a gay resort area, even in this time where homosexuality was generally kept behind closed doors.

“It’s precisely because my wife is giving birth and that there are two other brats in the house that I’m here,” Bowles said. “This is where I come to write my novels and compose my songs in quiet and solitude--and acceptance of what I enjoy doing with men. You don’t really want a tour of the city, do you? You want me to show you my villa on the hill up there, and you want me to tie you up with rope and beat you and fuck you, don’t you?”

“Yes, that’s what I want from you,” I answered meekly, so easily back under his control.

He fucked me first just inside the door to his villa, a small, but well-appointed house with a terrace overlooking the Tangier harbor and the Mediterranean opening off of both the living and bedroom areas. He was dressed all in white, his clothes elegantly cut--white trousers, shirts, vest, and jacket. Shortly after we entered his villa, I was naked and he was still dressed. He wanted it that way. His fly was unbuttoned and flared, his curly pubic bush exploding out of the open fly, but he was clothed other than that, including the white hat he was wearing. He fucked me up against the wall beside the door, with my knees hooked on his hips. He took me in hard, deep strokes that didn’t give me time to adjust to him. I loved every stroke of it.

While he fucked me, his houseboy, Hasan, a beautiful young Moroccan man of olive skin, dark hair, and sultry looks, padded around us, preparing drink and refreshments for us to have after Billy had had me. Hasan was almost as naked as I was, wearing just a loin cloth. As my uncle’s house servants--all young male, all as beautiful as Hasan--wore the same, I soon got the impression that this was normal in Tangier. I was later to discover that it was only normal in certain households.

After he finished fucking me, Bowles let me put my feet down on the floor and encouraged me to check out the villa while he went to the en suite bath to change. When he came back he was wearing a white robe--a kaftan--a simple ankle-length tunic, with a plunging neckline that I was to find was the garb of leisure in Tangier for men. My uncle wore only that in his villa as well, as, eventually, did I.

While he was gone I explored the villa. There was just the single living-dining area, one bedroom, and a kitchen area, with a servant’s room for Hasan behind it. The terrace, reached through both the living area and the bedroom, was almost as large as the enclosed space. There also was a large bath, a room almost as large as the bedroom, floored and walled with colorful porcelain tiles in an intricate geometric design. The sunken bathtub was large enough to accommodate three, which, indeed, before the evening was done, it did. I was to find that such a bath inside the villa was a luxury in Tangier, although Lord Harkwood’s villa had one for each of the six bedrooms.

I was walking around the walls of the bedroom, naked, admiring the artwork, most of which was composed of David Roberts lithographs of Egyptian and Near East landscapes in which the color ochre predominated. Roberts, twenty-five years dead, had become a favorite artist of the Middle East among Victorian Europeans with a nostalgia for the region. As I came around to near the French doors out onto the terrace, though, I came across a blank section of wall except for two iron handles above at a separation of four feet and two matching ones down near the floor. I looked at them with curiosity intent enough that I didn’t notice Billy coming up close behind me.

“Wondering what those are for?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I turned to look at him and sucked breath in. He had leather straps in one hand and a multithonged hand whip in the other.

“Special houses in Tangiers have these. I’ll show you what they are for.”

And then he did.

“You know I’m going to bind you and abuse you, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” I whispered, licking my lips at the painful pleasure he was leading me into.

He commanded me to raise my arms, which, with a whimper of anticipation, an anticipation that both frightened and compelled me, I did. He tied my wrists to the upper handles on each side. I meekly let him do it. Then he commanded me to spread my legs, which I did, and he tied off my ankles to the lower handles.

He flogged me on the back, buttocks, and thighs with the hand whip, stinging me only slightly at the beginning, but building up intensity as I writhed and moaned and he breathed heavily. At his call, Hasan came into the room and sat dutifully on the end of the bed, watching us.

The whipping stung and would raise welts, but it wasn’t life threatening. It was enough to make me go hard and to ejaculate against the wall, though. When I’d done that, Bowles pulled the kaftan over his head, revealing himself to be naked, came in close to my back, thrust his cock up into my ass, grabbed my pecs with the palms of his hands, buried his lips in the hollow of my neck, and fucked me to his own ejaculation.

I writhed under his attentions, begging him to fuck me harder, deeper, giving into him completely/

Leaving me hanging there, then, he went over to the bed, manipulated Hasan’s body into a belly-down spread-eagled position, stripped off the young man’s loincloth, and tied his spread arms and legs off with restraints at the four corners of the bed. Hasan submitted to this even more meekly than I had. I could understand why he, virtually an indentured servant, submitted. I was at a completely loss why I did other than it made me harder than any other form of sex and left me more satiated and drained of cum than any other sexual experience. Then, while I watched with my head turned to them, Bowles stood over the bed and whipped Hasan with the hand whip, somewhat more vigorously than he’d whipped me--at least Hasan’s screams seemed to bear that observation out.

I shared Hasan’s screams and his pain--even while feeling the loss that it wasn’t me.

When his arm was exhausted, Bowles dropped the whip at the foot of the bed and went into his bath and came back with a large jar of salve. After applying the salve to my welts while I still hung there, on the wall, he unbound me and handed me the jar. “You may have the pleasure of attending to Hasan and giving him whatever comfort you wish,” Bowles said. Then he exited to the terrace through the French doors and settled, facing the view of the late afternoon sun reflecting off the buildings descending to the harbor and sea, and took up the cigarettes and brandy Hasan had already laid out on a table between two lounge chairs.

I untied Hasan. He clung to me as I rubbed the salve into his welts, looking up at me with doe-like eyes. I did what came naturally. I took his lips in mine as we both reached for each other’s cocks and balls. He lowered his mouth to my cock and gave me head. Nearing ejaculation, I pulled him off me, turned him on his belly, put an arm under his waist to lift his pelvis, mounted him, and fucked him in slow, deep strokes, as he moaned and sighed.

At length, I picked the whip up from the carpet at the foot of the bed and, hovering over Hasan, let my arm drop, lashing at Hasan’s bare back and buttocks, as he writhed under me, begging me to fuck him again. I lash him again and again, making myself hard, and then I fucked him once more, taking him hard and fast. I ejaculated and all of the energy drained out of me. I pulled out of him, leaving him sobbing and, strangely, thanking me. I looked up to find that Bowles was standing in the doorway to the terrace, watching us. When he saw that I had seen him, he melted into the shadows of the terrace. I went to Bowles’ bath and scrubbed myself raw, trying to wash the channeling of Bowles off me.

When I returned, Hasan was still on the bed. He raised a hand toward me, begging me to beat and fuck him again, but, shrinking from how much he was like me with Bowles, I passed him by and walked out of the French doors onto the terrace.

I sat with Bowles on the terrace, smoking and drinking with him, as we watched the sun go down to the west behind the masts of ships in the approach to the entrance to the Mediterranean.

“If you stay the night, I will beat and fuck you again,” Bowles said in a perfectly calm voice.

“Yes,” I answered.

“You will stay the night,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I answered it anyway. “Yes.”

I expected him to take me back into the house and tie me to the wall, and he did rise from where he was seated, but it was to come, drop on his knees in front of me, part my legs, and take my cock in his mouth. I moved to take his head between my hands, but he brushed them away, signaling that I wasn’t to touch him. At length, when I was hard again, he rose, walked over to a platform bed on the terrace, went down on it on his belly, and growled, “Fuck me.”

Saddled on his pelvis, my knees hugging his hips and the palms of my hands pressed into his shoulder blades and then, leaning back, pressing my palms to his calves, I worked my cock into his channel and rode his ass to an ejaculation. He was completely silent and might have been sleeping if I didn’t feel the slight movement of his pelvis, pushing up at me as I thrust down into him. I was fucking him, but, even in this, at no time did I feel I was in command, dominating him. It was all him. As soon as I was inside him, the sensation for me was the muscles of his channel, pulling me in and releasing, pulling me in and releasing--even controlling the pace of the fuck. The passage muscles undulating over my shaft, milking me. I meekly submitted to him.

When I had ejaculated, he moved his hands back to my knees, signaling that I was to get off him, which I did, rolling off him to the side. “Come,” he said, standing.

I rose and followed him. He tied me to the wall and lashed and fucked me again. It was all him in command. Whether he was inside me or me in him, it was always him fucking me.

Later the three of us lowered ourselves in a bath that Hasan had drawn and Hasan and I rode Billy’s cock and Hasan rode mine.

Needless to say, Bowles and I didn’t make it back to the Hotel Continental in time to have supper with Lord Harkwood or the Andersons. Amelia was frosty to me and anyone else who came near her as breakfast began in the morning, but she softened when she realized that Sydney and I were leaving for the Grottes d’Hercule directly after breakfast. She made me promise not to forget her or to be a stranger.

Before we left, she and I managed to meet in an alcove where I had  a feel of her breasts and cunt through the material of her dress and she did the same with my crotch, we kissed, and we both promised to arrange to be more intimate the next time we met. While I was kissing her, though, my mind was on the lashing by Bowles and the sweet ass passage of Hasan.

* * * *

I found that, although Lord Harkwood was excavating a temple to Apollo and nearby cave tombs, near his hillside villa, which was near the wave-cut grottos of Hercules--the Grottes d’Hercule, a cliffside attraction along the coast seventeen miles west of Tangier--he likely was going to be doing so for decades. He didn’t seem to be particularly interested in the excavations, and we only went there to observe the work three or four days and week for only an hour or two at a time.

I went more often than he did. And it was in going alone that I hooked up with a young, native excavator, Karim, who seemed to be more interested in me than in his work. He gave me doe-eyed gazes whenever I came to the dig--and both those looks and his youthful, sultry beauty brought to mind Billy’s pliant houseboy, Hasan. It wasn’t long until my visits to the site included a visit to a grotto on the beach below the dig, where, holding him in a close embrace, listening to him gasp and moan, I excavated Karim’s anal passage with slow, deep, loving strokes.

It was a chance to release myself and take care of my needs without scrutiny from the supposed straight-laced view of sexuality of Lord Harkwood. Or so I thought. I thought it until the night I woke from my sleep in his villa to the sound of music and traced it to the villa’s banquet room opening onto a terrace over the Mediterranean. There, from the shadows, I watched one of the houseboys, Ahmed--and, surprisingly, Yousef from the ship--dancing naked in front of Harkwood, as he sat, robe raised to his waist, stroking an erection, and watching the dance. The dance concluded with Yousef sitting in Harkwood’s lap and fucking himself on the old man’s cock.

It was only then, when I looked to see where Ahmed had gone, that I saw Billy Bowles. At the same time I saw that there were restraint handles on the wall of the banquet room. Bowles was tying Ahmed to the wall. He had begun to lash Ahmed with a cane when he turned at the gasping sound I must have made at seeing him and realized I was there in the shadows.

I had a head start on him, but he was faster than I was. He brought me to ground in the middle of one of the back bedrooms, landing on my back as I scrabbled along on all fours. He didn’t push me all the way to the floor. He wanted me on all fours. He raised the cane and snapped it down, again and again, as I writhed under him, begging him for mercy, but going hard for him and going soft for him inside. As he thrust inside me, my channel walls expanded with the invasion and began undulating over the penetrating cock. He held me up on all fours as he rode my ass and lashed out at my flanks with the cane. He was in high heat and seed me in a flood of semen again and again and again, as I lay there trembling, totally open to him, wanting what he was giving me.

He stayed the night, pinning me to my bed. When I woke in the morning, he was gone. As I passed Uncle Sydney’s bed chamber, the door was open. He and Yousef, both still asleep, were in each other’s arms in the bed. So much for any wonder on why Lord Harkwood never failed to take in the fall Tangier season.

* * * *

Lord Harkwood had taken me to a Turkish bath in the old, Medina, section of Tangier. Now that he was out in the open with me--and me with him--there was no hiding of Yousef in his bed and Ahmed in mine. Thus, the bath he took me to was one of special preferences. When we entered the waters of the pool, each with the personal attendant we had picked out of a lineup of nubile young men, I was surprised to see Mr. Anderson already there, sitting on a bench running around the rim of the pool but below water level. One of the attendants was sitting in his lap, facing away from him, and rising and falling on the American’s cock.

We merely nodded to each other as Lord Harkwood and I settled beside him and each of our attendants took up the same position his was taking. We grunted and groaned through our separate ejaculations in the passages of our attendants and then, nearly simultaneously, rose up out of the water to sit on the rim of the pool as our attendants sat below us, each taking his assigned cock in his mouth and giving us head.

It was more comfortable talking to each other now, which we did, none of us apparently embarrassed at finding the other in a servicing facility such as this, with a young man sucking our cocks to the capability of a second coming.

“Mr. Anderson has a proposition for you, Gregory,” Lord Harkwood said to me. “That’s why we’ve met here.”

“Oh?” I said, turning to the American. Did Uncle Sydney want to send me across the ocean? Was he afraid I’d inform Aunt Margery about his activities here in Tangier?

No, it was nothing like that.

“I want you to marry my daughter, Amelia,” Anderson said. “She’s a handful and she fancies you.”

“Marry your daughter?” I asked. “Under these circumstances? What the three of us are doing here? What it obviously means?”

“I don’t care who else you fuck,” Anderson said. “Both Sydney and I have made accommodations to that. You can too.”

I turned and looked at Uncle Sydney for guidance.

“It’s what you need to do,” he said simply. “It’s what I did at your time of life. You need the domestic life. You need heirs. And you need camouflage. As you can see, I have managed to do as I like. You can do as well. And you need the financial backing. I won’t be here forever. As soon as I die, Margery will go directly back to the States and take her money with her. What will you do without the allowance I give you? What will your mother do for financial support?”

“You want to buy me for your daughter?” I blurted out, turning back to Anderson. He was engaged at the moment in the final stages of an ejaculation in his attendant’s mouth, though, so, after he’d done that, I had to repeat the question.

Apparently not seeing anything wrong with that, Anderson said, “Yes, precisely. She wants you. My houseboy, Elias, is outside of the baths. He will take you to my villa after we are done here. I am going out to the grottos with your uncle for the night. He has special entertainment laid on. You have all night alone with Amelia in my villa. I assure you that she will receive you. Make her happy--all night--and propose to her in the morning. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll write you the first check. There is a ring there too for you to give to her. She picked it out before we left New York.”

So the world tour had been to acquire a husband for Amelia--and she had decided that would be me.

I went to the Andersons’ villa straight from the baths. I made Amelia happy, and she said yes to everything. She loved the ring, as I knew she would; after all, she had picked it out, just as she had picked me out.

* * * *

Uncle Sydney wanted to visit the archaeological dig three days later. I had only been back to his villa for a day, having been captive in Amelia’s bed for two nights, the second night being disconcerting, as her father came in the room to watch me fucking her and then asked me to come to his room and fuck him--which I did, as the paid-for toy I was. Sydney looked a little poorly when I returned and made some remark about having enjoyed himself a bit too much. Yousef was walking around with welts on his back, and I wondered if my uncle had graduated to rough sex or if Billy had been there.

At the site, I went looking for Karim while my uncle went into one of the cave tombs covered by his firman. I didn’t find Karim, and Lord Harkwood hadn’t reappeared from the tomb for longer than I thought he’d be. I went to explore and found them, lying on top of a stone sarcophagus. Karim, a scared expression on his face, was lying, naked, his legs spread, on his back. Sydney, quite dead, was lying on top of him, his trousers around his ankles, his flaccid cock no doubt still inside Karim’s passage.

Needless to say, I didn’t tell the world the circumstance of Lord Harkwood’s passing, nor did I fuck Karim that day. We had both recovered by the second day and I brought him up to the villa to help console me.

I was surprised as hell to find out that this made me Lord Harkwood now. I hadn’t really given that I thought. When I did give it a thought, I realized that the land taxes for Falconcroft were mine now and that moneybags Margery would be packed and gone before I got back to England to bury Uncle Sydney in the family crypt.

Amelia and I got married before I departed by ship to return Sydney’s cremation urn to England. William Bowles was my best man for the wedding ceremony. He also was best man for both Amelia and me on the wedding night, saddling up behind me while I was fucking Amelia, and then fucking her himself afterward--but taking me away for the night. Amelia didn’t seem to mind that arrangement a bit.

One thing I knew for sure; I was going to continue to observe the Tangier season.