In a futuristic world, Haven is a negotiator, a man with healing powers and diplomat ability who is sending on troubled foreign planets to facilitate alliance pacts. During one of these travels he finds a young boy, barely 12 years old, who is taken as a sex slave by a slave trader and who will be soon sold to a customer. Seeing in the boy the same healing powers he has, Haven buys the boy and brings him back to his home planet. The boy, named Wren, is raised to be a diplomat himself, and when he is 18 years old he is given as novice to Master Haven. Four years later, Haven is in a diplomatic mission in a foreign planet who requires that every adult man is accompanying by a sex slave. Obviously Wren offers himself to play the role, but nor him or Haven could image what they will have to do: public sex is saw as a tribute and Haven finds himself in front of an hard decision: fully take his novice or let someone else doing the job...

Almost all the book is spent waiting for the defloration of Wren and actually sometime I feel sorry for poor Haven who is always under temptation. Also before their compelled intimacy in a foreign country, Haven was starting to feel something more for Wren than the natural affection of a Master for his novice, and Wren was not helping on it, since he is in love with Haven since the man saved him ten years before. In Haven's planet, sexual release is not allowed and above all not with a novice, so Haven knows that, if he gives up to temptation, he will lose Wren forever.

Haven is a stoic character, actually he has not a dominant nature: he has a good heart, but all in all he is taken around by Wren almost like he has a leash around the neck and not Wren. Wren is a smart guy: in a way or another he manages to obtain what he wants, and after all I don't think he would be a good diplomat like Haven: I can't imagine him living a total chaste life!

A good sci-fiction romance, with a good weight on the romance side and a little less on the sci-fic one: also the adventurous sub plot and the villain are not so scary after all, and their elimination is quite immediate. All the book is centered on Haven and Wren, and on their budding relationship, better on their "evolving" relationship, from Master and novice, to lovers.