Desire in the Isles Read online

  Desire in the Isles

  by

  Roland Graeme

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: Cruising Altitude

  Chapter Two: Sleeping Arrangements

  Chapter Three: The Welcoming Committee

  Chapter Four: An Erotic Reveille

  Chapter Five: A Rendezvous

  Chapter Six: Lust Below Decks

  Chapter Seven: Under Full Sail

  Chapter Eight: An Amateur Pirate

  Chapter Nine: Two Men in a Tub

  Chapter Ten: Military Maneuvers

  Chapter Eleven: Highland Flings

  Chapter Twelve: The Gay Ghost

  Chapter Thirteen: Deep Drilling

  Chapter Fourteen: Steam Heat

  Chapter Fifteen: Personal Attention

  Chapter Sixteen: Camping Out Under the Stars

  Chapter Seventeen: Future Plans

  Chapter Eighteen: The Moonlit Broch

  Chapter Nineteen: Rubbed the Right Way

  Chapter Twenty: Homeward Bound

  Also by Roland Graeme

  Copyright © 2017 Roland Graeme

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except for the use of brief excerpts in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Published by Roland Graeme

  Cover design by Muzio Scaevola

  Chapter One: Cruising Altitude

  Carter was traveling light. He had one bag slung over his right shoulder, and he was carrying the other one in his left hand.

  He supposed he looked a bit scruffy, He had a neatly trimmed chestnut brown beard. But his hair was long. He sometimes wore it pulled back from his face and secured, but today he’d chosen to wear it loose. Flowing in waves from the top of his head down to his shoulders, his tresses gave him a vaguely biblical look. Or, as a friend of his had recently taunted him, he was “the world’s oldest hippie!” Having just turned thirty, Carter hardly believed he qualified for the title of the world’s oldest anything. But he was certainly no young twink.

  He was experiencing a certain degree of culture shock, after having traveled for most of the day. Like a lot of Americans who’d crossed the Atlantic for the first time, Carter hadn’t realized just how small an island Great Britain was. His flight from London to Edinburgh had taken only a little over an hour.

  But then, ironically enough, it had taken an additional half an hour to reach the center of Edinburgh by bus. The city’s airport was located eight miles west of the city. After the short flight, the thirty-minute bus ride struck Carter as rather inefficient. But at least it had given him the opportunity to start seeing something of Scotland, where he’d be spending the next few weeks.

  He’d taken a train at Edinburgh’s Waverley station, and now, after a six hour and thirty minute ride, he found himself in the small town of Maillaig, on Scotland’s west coast. He had to admit that along the way he’d seen some remarkable Highland scenery from the windows of the railway car.

  Now, at least, he was going to vary his mode of transportation by catching a ferry.

  In Maillaig, the harbor was a short walk from the train station. Relieved at having arrived in plenty of time to make his connection, Carter had some time to kill. There was a small café near the docks, with seating both inside and outdoors. Seated at one of the outside tables, Carter decided to forego his usual caffeine fix. Operating on the principle of “when in Scotland, do as the Scots do,” he ordered tea and a scone. After slathering the scone with butter and plum jam, he ate it and sipped his tea while observing the activity in the harbor. Dwarfed by the waiting ferry, many small boats were moored in rows. Seagulls darted restlessly to and fro in the air, frequently making landings to search the ground for edible scraps.

  He saw a steady stream of other passengers boarding the ferry. Cars, too, were driven on board, and they disappeared, swallowed up in the vessel’s lower deck. Carter paid his bill and joined his fellow passengers, setting foot on the open upper deck with five minutes to spare. Or so he thought. The five minutes passed. Then another five. And so on, until it was twenty minutes past the scheduled sailing time.

  Glancing around at his fellow passengers, Carter realized that his growing impatience to get going put him in the minority. Few of the others seemed at all concerned. Their insouciance seemed directly related to the fact that the ferry had a cash bar where liquid refreshments were served. Alcohol, Carter saw, was flowing freely, and some of the passengers were distinctly merry.

  As for the crew members, they came and went, going about their business with a sort of languid efficiency. Carter didn’t see anything indicative of an imminent departure, though.

  All morning, while traveling, Carter had enjoyed good weather. He’d been warned to pack in expectation of encountering cold, damp conditions. It was the first week of May, and the air temperature was surprisingly warm. But now, as the afternoon wore on, he could see dense masses of ominous dark clouds moving in over the Atlantic from the west. The sea itself was a dull slate gray, and it was increasingly choppy, capped with white foam where the breakers beat upon the shore. The temperature was falling, and a stiff cold breeze had sprung up. Patches of fog drifted through the air, like curtains magically suspended, with nothing to hold them up.

  Finally, Carter accosted one of the ship’s officers.

  “Is the boat going to leave?” Carter asked.

  “Of course, sir. Eventually. We apologize for the delay.”

  “No, what I mean is—is it actually going to attempt the crossing in this weather?”

  “This kind of weather is common here during this time of year, sir,” the man said, smoothly. “It doesn’t stop us, although we may have to reduce our speed. There is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.”

  Yeah, Carter wanted to retort. Nothing except the possibility of ending up in a lifeboat, being tossed about on those waves! He found a seat on one of the benches on the deck, where he sulked.

  The crossing of the Sound of Sleat, from Maillaig to the town of Armadale on the Island of Skye, was supposed to take half an hour. That much time had already elapsed, with the ferry still docked.

  When an announcement finally came over the loudspeakers, advising the passengers that the vessel would soon get under weigh, Carter, bored shitless by the delay, quickly got up and stretched. As he did so, his eye was caught by a young guy who boarded the boat just before the deckhands withdrew the gangplank. The delay had worked in this guy’s favor. Presumably, he’d intended to take the next ferry, but he had arrived in time to catch this one. Carter, glancing casually in his direction, did a double-take. He’d been around long enough to know a really hot number when he saw one.

  This kid was not as tall as Carter, but he was a bit huskier. He had a somewhat stocky frame, curly brown hair, and a thick mustache. He was traveling in casual clothes—a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off so that his muscular arms were
freed, and a pair of faded, almost falling-apart jeans. He had a backpack and a duffel bag.

  But Carter couldn’t help noticing that, decrepit as they were, the jeans were very tight, closely hugging the guy’s thighs, crotch, and ass. In fact, when Carter casually took a few paces to one side so that he obtain a rear view of his fellow passenger, he could see that the nearly threadbare seat of those pants was stretched virtually skintight across the young stud’s round, perfectly-shaped ass cheeks. The scenery here in Scotland, Carter thought lewdly, was really beautiful—and it was getting better all the time.

  He ached to reach out and caress that tantalizing behind, to run his hand along the guy’s butt crack and then goose him right in the manhole. But he restrained himself. They had a short boat ride ahead of them, and during it Carter would surely be able to indulge in the vicarious pleasure of secretly lusting after his fellow passenger. Carter had no illusions that anything would develop past that. The guy who’d attracted his attention was probably a rich, spoiled college student or a young business executive, going off to somewhere in the Western Hebrides on vacation, to hike and camp out.

  Carter’s fantasies about the young number kept him busy for the first few minutes of the trip. Only gradually did he realize that the crossing was quickly degenerating into the equivalent of a floating frat party.

  Prominent among the passengers was a large group of German tourists, all of them male, and all of them apparently determined, with typical Teutonic singlemindedness, to accomplish three things while they were on the ferry. First, to converse among themselves in their native tongue as loudly and in as boisterous a manner as possible. Second, to take photographs nonstop with their expensive cameras. And third, to consume as much authentic Scotch whiskey as they could down without actually passing out. They were supplementing their visits to the bar with frequent recourse to the hip flasks which all of them seemed to carry.

  One of these gentleman had gotten into the party spirit and had been downing whiskey steadily ever since the boat left the dock, and now the bartender wouldn’t let him have any more. No problem—the man’s buddies continued to get refills, which they surreptitiously shared with him. Thoroughly wasted, and unsteady on his feet, the guy left his companions and approached Carter. From his pocket, the drunkard pulled out a little German-English phrase book and thumbed through it.

  “Where—bathroom—men’s room?” he stammered, in thickly accented English, slurred by the alcohol he’d consumed.

  “Ah—that way,” Carter said, pointing to a sign. “Although I think on a boat it’s called the head,” he added, in an attempt to be helpful.

  This was more information that the drunken man needed. He staggered off in the direction Carter had indicated and disappeared. Carter hoped, for the sake of whoever was responsible for cleanup on board the boat, that the guy made it to the toilet before he threw up.

  After a few minutes, the German reappeared, looking pale. Still feeling “seasick,” he had to lie down on one of the benches for the duration of the crossing. His buddies, of course, found this hilarious.

  After this less than edifying diversion, Carter was grateful when the young guy he had noticed boarding the boat at the last moment casually walked along the deck toward him, carrying a soft-drink can in his hand. At the sight of him, Carter’s cock began throbbing and his palms grew sweaty. God, there were still about twenty minutes to go before the boat landed, but already he was getting horny just from the proximity of another sexy stud.

  The other guy studied the group of Germans. Then he caught Carter’s gaze, held it, and he laughed. “Welcome to the Western Islands,” he said, chuckling and taking a swig of his soft drink. “Are you actually sober?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then that makes at least two of us. Not counting the crew—and I’m only assuming that they’re all abstaining.”

  “I sure hope they are,” Carter said. “Especially in this rough sea.”

  “Oh, I was only joking. I’m sure everything’s under control and that we’re perfectly safe. I talked to one of the crew members. He told me they’ve reduced speed, just as a precaution, so it’ll take us longer than usual to get across to Skye. So we may as well relax. Hey, is that seat next to you taken?"

  “No,” Carter said. “I’ve been praying that one of these partygoers won’t take it and start subjecting me to a drunken monologue. Please, sit down.”

  “Thanks. That fucking party up front’s getting to be a bit much for me. It’s giving me a headache. I’d join in, but I’m not much of a drinker. Not during the daylight hours, that is. After sundown, it’s another matter. Then, all bets are off.”

  Carter had been in England and Scotland for only a very short time, but he had already encountered a variety of regional accents. Some of them verged on the incomprehensible to a speaker of American English. But this guy, though definitely English, was understandable enough.

  As he spoke, the guy slipped into the seat beside Carter, who stole a quick glance down at his new neighbor’s crotch. Carter saw that his jeans were beginning to wear through and look badly frayed on both sides of the crotch—and Carter could easily see why. The guy had a bulge inside there the size of a grapefruit, which no doubt placed the frequently laundered denim fabric under considerable strain.

  Carter also examined the husky, hard-muscled thighs swelling out from his fellow passenger’s hips and he quickly tried to get a mental picture of him in the nude—and he found the attempt highly arousing.

  “Which means I stand out like a sore thumb here,” the young Englishman went on, leaning back in his seat and spreading his legs. “Not being much of a hard liquor drinker, I mean. That’s about all there is to do on some of these small, isolated islands—drink and fuck.”

  Carter was having trouble keeping his eyes straight ahead. What he desperately wanted to do was to grope the other young man’s crotch, to find out if it felt as good as it looked—and that would just be for openers! Then the kid began pulling at his crotch to make himself more comfortable, adjusting the taut denim which strained across his basket quite unselfconsciously, and that sight got Carter even more excited.

  “But I’m being rude,” his new acquaintance said. “I should introduce myself. I’m Liam—Liam Purvis.”

  “My name’s Carter Burrell.”

  They shook hands.

  “You sound like an American,” Liam remarked.

  “I am.”

  “What part of the States do you come from?”

  “Michigan, originally. But I live in New York City. And you?”

  “Oh, I’m a Dorset man. Born and bred. But now I live in London. I go to university there.”

  “What brings you to Scotland? Are you here on your summer vacation?”

  “You might call it a working vacation. I’m studying archaeology, you see. I’ll be spending the summer as part of a volunteer crew, excavating and studying old Norse ruins and burial grounds. The isles are full of them.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  “Well, we think it’s interesting, but I’m afraid a layman might find it terribly boring. We’ll be spending most of our time out in the field, living in tents, working from dawn to dusk. We have to take advantage of the natural light, you see. The job is mostly digging and more digging, and sifting the soil for any artifacts. When it rains, we spread out tarps overhead, and we go right on digging and sifting. The odds of discovering anything really spectacular are pretty remote, but even the smallest things can tell us something about how the people lived back then. At night, when we’re all worn out, there’s not much in the way of recreation, except for what we come up with ourselves. Which is probably a good thing, because most nights all I want to do is crawl into my sleeping bag and nod off. And the irony is, after we’re done with a site, we usually put everything back the way we found it—which means shoveling all that damn dirt right back where it was.”

  “Usually? You mean you don’t always replace the d
irt?”

  “Not always. If we uncover the remains of a building, for example, we might leave that exposed. But then we have to stabilize it, to protect it from being damaged by the environment. The climate up here tends to be mild, on the whole, but the winter months can be rough. That’s why we can only do our work during the summer months.”

  “It sounds as though you’ve done this before.”

  “Oh, this won’t be my first dig, by any means. And I was here last summer, so I know what to expect. I have no illusions! We’ll be working on some different sites this year—that’s all. What about you? Are you on holiday?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m here to work, too. Although I must admit that, for once, sightseeing will be part of my job. I’m a cameraman. I work for one of the cable television networks back home in the States. I’m on a new assignment. I’ll be filming a travel show called Off the Beaten Track. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it—”

  “But I have! It’s shown here. I never miss it.”

  Carter chuckled. “Well, I guess that saves me the need to go into a lengthy explanation.”

  “That bloke Stanislaus Pulaski is your boss?”

  “My new boss, yes.”

  “You aren’t traveling with him?”

  “No, he and his two assistants flew across a couple of days ago, to finalize some of our traveling and living arrangements. I’m meeting up with them. In a town on Skye called Portree.”

  Back in the States, Off the Beaten Track was a popular cable show, which was now starting its third season.

  The show’s format was simple, and it was comparatively inexpensive to produce. A small crew accompanied the star, Stanislaus Pulaski, on his treks to various parts of the world. Out of the way places, overlooked by the average tourist, were preferred. The hour-long segments were frequently rerun, and they were also available as boxed sets of DVDs which included additional footage and extras.

  Carter had been employed by the studio for a couple of years, during which he’d been given a variety of assignments, when he was offered the chance to audition for a new job—to film Off the Beaten Track throughout its third season.