“You see, Paige here comes from a long line of Lords and Ladies,” Seastrider added somewhat mockingly, “and she likes to remind us as often as possible that she chose the life of a free and merry… merchant.”
Yes, that was the moment I realized that they probably weren’t merchants, but I figured it’d be for the best if I didn’t press that potentially hazardous issue.
“Hey,” Paige jokingly barked, “my life, my story.”
Breathing a small sigh of relief that I’d had the chance of me blurting out something about them being pirates snatched away from me, I went ahead and spawned another sack of meat.
“Look, more food,” I said more enthusiastically than I’d intended, “you want to call for some more crew members?”
Seastrider regarded me somewhat curiously after that, “Why do I get the feeling you’re tryin’ to get all the people off my ship?”
Again, my eyes widened, “No, that’s not what I-”
“Maybe he just wants you people to hurry up and get the Hell out of here?” Fern suggested somewhat bitchily.
A tense few seconds followed that.
A few really tense seconds that were only compounded by the fact that a second, slightly nervous duo had already started to shift the second sack.
“You’d do well to rein her in,” Seastrider finally said, making a show of resting her palm on the hilt of her blade, “wouldn’t want her to ruin a perfectly good deal.”
“And you’d do well not to tell me how I should treat the people here,” I replied before I really knew I was speaking, “I’m more than happy to let this run smoothly, however, while Fern could’ve put her… suggestion better, I’m not goin’ to do busine-”
“Good to see you stand up for your people,” Seastrider interjected, irritating me slightly with the fact that I couldn’t seem to finish a thought, “but I think you’re right. I’ll get your second payment, then we’ll get out of your hair.”
I internally cursed at the fact that I’d clearly just talked myself out of a potentially fruitful relationship, but at the same time I was more than happy to side with Fern.
“Dax,” Jesse muttered after I’d nodded and the ‘merchants’ had turned to leave, “maybe you could talk to them about what they have that you could buy?”
“Oh, shit, yeah.” I murmured in response before turning my attention back to Paige and Seastrider, “Hey! I just came into some money, and I hear you gals are in the business of… being merchants.”
It wasn’t my best sentence, sure, but it was enough to get the two of them to turn around.
“And what would you want?” Seastrider asked.
“What have you got?” I replied.
Seastrider went to say something, then looked at Cassie and Fern, “Maybe they should leave?” she said, “You know, before they decide to have another little outburst.”
Cassie and Fern clearly wanted to say something to that, well, Fern wanted to say something, Cassie wanted to start swinging, but instead they both looked to me.
“Do you mind giving me a few minutes with them?” I asked as politely as I could, to which both Fern and Cassie’s faces drooped, “I just want to make sure this place gets the best chance possible, and if I can get some materials from them that’ll be a whole lot easier.”
Neither of them seemed particularly happy with the outcome, though they both clearly understood where I was coming from.
“Shout if you need us.” Cassie finally replied before nudging Fern slightly and starting off towards the jungle, “C’mon, we can get some work done on the house while Dax handles this.”
Both Seastrider and Paige appeared to be pretty damn smug about getting me to send the bulk of my group away, which pissed me off more than I thought it would.
“Okay, so what have you got?” I asked somewhat aggressively once the girls were out of sight, “How about that gun of yours? How much for that?”
“This?” Seastrider scoffed, tapping one of the pistols on her chest, “Trust me when I say that you haven’t got anything on this island that I’d trade one of my guns for.”
There was a small part of me that just wanted to forcefully take it with the Toolbox, but that part was getting sufficiently quashed by the fact that I knew she’d shoot before I so much as spawned in another.
“This’d be a whole lot easier if you just told me what you had and what you want for it.” I said after a few seconds of umming and ahhing about mounting a small but doomed to fail assault.
I’m aware that that wasn’t really how I was supposed to play the game, yes, and I also knew that I’d probably end up making nice with them at some point in the future, but they’d ticked me off some, and the more confident side of me was starting to take over.
The problem with that was that I was pissing off Seastrider more, as well as the obvious fact that I didn’t know how long I could keep it up or how well I’d be able to back it up.
In fact, I was right about to give up and take my chances with a fight when, out of the blue, Paige chuckled, earning her confused looks from both myself and her Captain.
“You head aboard, Captain,” she said with an amused smile, “I’ll take a walk with this cocky numpty and see what we can offer him.”
Seastrider didn’t seem altogether happy with that outcome, but at the same time she obviously trusted her Quartermaster.
“I’ll be back in no time,” Paige added as she started coming down the bridge towards Jesse and I, “and it certainly won’t hurt for us to have a friendly port.”
“Alright,” Seastrider replied somewhat begrudgingly after Paige had reached me and turned back to face her Captain, “but the second he or one of his… companions decides to do somethin’ stupid like piss you off you have my full permission to run ‘em all through. Port don’t need to be friendly if those what run it are dead.”
“Have to say that that hurts my feelings somewhat.” I said with a slightly cocky smile that I couldn’t repress.
To my surprise, Seastrider let out an amused little sound at that, “Ten minutes,” she said before turning around and walking back onto her ship, “and I’ll be holding onto the other half of his payment until you’re back.”
“Please, like he has any reason to keep me here,” Paige laughed before looking me up and down with an expression that I couldn’t quite pin, “let alone could.”
“Just hurry up.” Seastrider replied from aboard the ship, “We’ve got a lot of drachmae to make, and I doubt it’s here.”
After that Jesse, Paige, and I all just looked at each other, each of us waiting for one of the others to make the first move.
“So,” Paige practically whispered, “feel free to totally ignore this, but would you mind tellin’ your lizard pal here to go for a short walk?”
Naturally, that concerned me.
“I… Why?” I asked, looking down at Jesse who seemed about as worried as I did.
“Oh, just because I have a funny thing about doin’ it in front of animals.” Paige replied, again opting to whisper.
“Do wha-oh…” I trailed off as I realized she wasn’t talking about business, “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Jesse murmured before Paige could respond, “I’m just goin’ to go ahead and excuse myself and… I don’t know, I’ll go check on Cassie and Fern I guess.”
I was still thrown, something that wasn’t helped at all by the fact that Paige had gone ahead and started walking into the jungle, leaving me to almost stumble after her as I tried to look as casual as possible.
Yeah, turns out all that confidence and suaveness kind of goes out the window when sex is not only on the table but practically guaranteed, and that ‘practically’ was only because I was about ninety percent sure she was just separating me from my group so she could kill me.
That being said, it was a risk I was going to take.
CHAPTER 10
“Keep up, would you?” Paige teased as I struggled to keep sight of her in the unfamiliar section of the
jungle, “I can’t be out here all day.”
“Which leads me to my question about why you are here at all,” I said after almost dropping the pouch of drachma that I still wasn’t sure what to do with, “seriously, neither you nor your Captain seemed all that impressed with me and my friends, so where has this come from?”
Paige shrugged at that without turning around, “Guess I liked seein’ someone stare down the Captain for once. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the woman, but it was kinda… I don’t know, I wanna say ‘titillating’ but that just sounds weird.”
“So you were turned on by me having a go at your authority figure?” I asked with a little laugh.
“It’s not as simple as that, but sure, why not.” Paige chuckled in response before coming to a stop in front of a particularly wide and tall tree where she turned to face me, “Here’s good.”
Now, normally that’s where I would have said something stupid that put a damper on the moment, but I was trying out the whole ‘confidence’ thing, and considering that it had got me that far I figured it was only fair to keep going.
So, with no small amount of difficulty, I dropped my pouch of gold and made for Paige, pressing her up against the tree and kissing her before the drachma had even hit the jungle floor.
Her lips were soft, but I could half-taste the lime she’d had at some point earlier in the day, although that wasn’t my main focus.
No, what really caught my attention were the freckles that dusted the bridge of her nose and her cheeks which I was able to catch fleeting glimpses of as I sort of reverse blinked a few times.
My right hand found its way to her right thigh, lifting it so I could better press against her, while my other cupped her athletic ass, which had clearly been well-worked from however long she’d been at sea.
A small but still obvious moan escaped her lips as I started to grow, my hard member pressing against her tight pants, to which she hastily went to work getting the lace that held her pants up untied.
There were still a lot of obstacles once she’d quickly but awkwardly got her pants off past her boots, but I was more than happy to ignore the baldric and pistols I was pushing my chest against as she reached down the front of my pants and pulled out my rock-solid cock.
Not wanting to have all the fun outside of the kissing, I let the hand that I’d put back on her ass once she’d gotten her pants off come around her thigh and slipped two of my fingers inside her, eliciting a surprised but happy little squeak from her.
Then, without any sort of warning other than breaking away from the kiss, I pulled my hand away, grabbed her other thigh, and lifted her up against the tree, much to Paige’s delight based on her smile.
That smile swiftly changed to an o-face though after I’d got into a more or less perfect position and eased myself into her.
I’m not sure why, but that was when I discovered that she had just about the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, like two slightly speckled emeralds, though that wasn’t my focus for too long as I pulled out slightly and pushed back in, going slightly deeper than I had the first time and causing her to let out a pant-like breath and wrap her legs around my lower back.
Don’t get me wrong, it was kind of hard to keep holding her the way I was what with the fact that I hadn’t put any work into getting fit at that point, but the more I thrusted the more it seemed that I could hold her forever, and before long I’d gotten into a good pattern.
Then Paige had to go ahead and ruin it by pulling herself to me and kissing me, which unsurprisingly led to me falling backward onto my ass.
Paige didn’t seem to mind though, her legs still wrapped around my lower back meaning they didn’t get crushed, and, truth be told, I wasn’t exactly ready to call it quits just because I had the balance of an inverted bowling pin and a sore butt.
“You okay?” Paige asked, slightly breathless, as she got into a more straddle position, somehow managing to keep me inside her the whole time, “You’re not too hurt or anythin’?”
Not quite able to form words, I simply nodded and grabbed her ass with both of my hands, encouraging her to start slowly rocking, sliding almost all the way off before pushing herself back on as far as she could.
Before long she was going fast and hard right up until my left leg started to tremble slightly, which she apparently found incredibly amusing based on her expression and took as a cue to up the ante, moaning loudly and moving her hips around as she continued to ride me.
For a second there I was worried that I was going to finish and leave her high and dry, but then her o-face turned to a capital D-face and she too started to tremble and shake, her eyes locked shut as she moaned the jungle down.
“Yes,” she groaned in ecstasy, pulling my face into her chest as she did so, “yes, yes, yes!”
And, with that, we finished, my face still buried in her shuddering breasts as she wound down her speed as if she was worried that stopping altogether would cause some kind of issue.
“Bloody Hell…” I muttered before finally pulling away from her chest, just barely managing to keep myself in a seated position with my hands practically buried in the dirt, “that was fun, huh?”
“I-I suppose so,” Paige replied with a meek sort of chuckle without making any attempt whatsoever to get off, “I take it you’re happy?”
“I’m happy if you’re happy,” I said, smiling as best as I could while refilling my lungs, “and you are happy, right?”
Paige smiled at that and nodded, “Defin-”
“Paige!?” a familiar Scottish voice roared through the jungle, “Paige!? Where are you!?”
At first nothing happened, we both just stared at each other for a while, and then, for whatever reason, Paige’s eyes widened to almost cartoonish proportions right before she shot off of me and started looking around for her pants.
“What’s wrong?” I asked calmly as I grabbed and pulled on my pants without getting up, “She’s probably just worried.”
“Yeah, exactly.” Paige replied concernedly after she’d found her pants and started forcing them over her boots one leg at a time.
“Alright,” I said with a sort of confused tone before seeing my pouch of drachmae and picking it up, “so that’s fine, right? She’s just worried about her crew?”
“Yeah, except when she worries about her crew she gets a bit…” Paige trailed off as she struggled to tighten the lace at the front of her pants, “arson-happy.”
“Oh…” I replied, looking into the jungle around where I heard Seastrider’s voice and started to worry about Jesse and the others, “oh that’s not good.”
“Paige!?”
CHAPTER 11
“So, uh, you’ll just need a proper bed and a few other odds and ends?” Paige asked as we got closer to Seastrider and the five crew members she’d brought along with her, all of whom were brandishing weapons.
“Yeah, yeah, that sounds good to me.” I replied, finding it somewhat difficult to hide the fact that we hadn’t said a word before Paige had asked that first question.
“Where in the bloody fuck have you two been?” Seastrider growled as we finally forced our ‘accidental’ meeting.
“Us?” Paige asked innocently, “We were just… We were just looking around the island, makin’ sure there wasn’t anythin’ else that he could trade for.”
Seastrider clearly doubted her Quartermaster, but let it slide, “Well, anythin’ of use?”
“Nothing that we could find,” Paige replied, “but I reckon that other half of his payment will cover his needs.”
“Which would be?”
“A bed, a sword, and some sort of gun.” Paige said, clearly having thought the whole thing through without telling me, “That was right, wasn’t it?”
It took me a second to realize that she was talking to me, though I was able to pass it off as me just being distracted by the gold I was still holding, “Yeah, yeah, that was it.”
The truth was I could think of about a million diffe
rent things I needed, but my brain was absolutely refusing to let me focus on any one of them long enough for me to actually get the words to my mouth.
“Right, sounds good to me,” the Captain said before sheathing the sword she’d been carrying and holstering her pistol, “we’ll head back to the dock and get it all sorted then, eh?”
“Aye, Captain.” Paige replied almost involuntarily before following after Seastrider with me in close tow.
It was a bit weird, the sudden disconnect we had, but on the way back to the ship I was pleasantly surprised with the few sly looks and cheeky smiles Paige snuck my way between pretending to want nothing to do with me.
There was a part of me that wanted to ask her to stay, not least because it would be good to have someone on the island who definitely knew how to use a gun, but also because I felt like she’d be a genuinely fun addition to the little clan I was forming.
I knew there wasn’t any real hope for that though, especially not with the Captain standing right there, and besides that I had a feeling that if I played my cards right I’d be able to get Paige, Seastrider, and the rest of the crew to become a part of the harem.
It wasn’t going to be on that day, obviously, but I liked my chances for the future, particularly if I could tidy the island up some, give it some real oomph value.
That was stuff I could focus on later though, and I was quick to push it to the back of my mind as we reached the dock.
The journey there had been done without saying a word for the most part, and the same could be said of when I’d been left on the dock by myself where I had been told to wait with a dismissive hand gesture while the Captain arranged for the items to be rather unceremoniously dumped beside me.
The king-sized bed was nice enough, especially when you compared it to the bed I already had, and while the crew was clearly confused by the fact that I only wanted the one pistol and sword, it meant that they were happy to give me weapons of a somewhat decent quality.
“I threw in some linen and pillows,” Seastrider said as she inspected the stuff her crew had brought down, “and a bag of shot to go along with that pistol of yours.”
Build-A-Harem- The Island Collection Page 11