Dirty Like Seth: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 3)

by Jaine Diamond

  She’s gone.

  Lana’s fucking gone, and she’s never coming back.

  An alarm is sounding, shrill and all-pervading. It’s in Catch’s skull, behind his eyes, in the marrow of his bones, ringing.

  He pulls the pillow over his head and ignores it.

  Then the voices start. Moments later, or hours. He doesn’t know which. But he knows those voices.

  He rolls over, pushing away the pillow, his body aching. His lips sting, dry and cracked. His arm itches where he cut it last night.

  He’s naked and there are men in his cube.

  He looks up at them with one cracked eye, the light overhead stabbing deep into the back of his brain.

  It’s Hilt and… First?

  “Turn off the goddamn light…” His voice is so dry, so weak, he doesn’t know if they hear him. They’re still talking, making too much noise. Their voices come in and out as Catch blinks his disorientation away, squinting, wincing into the light.

  “… like I told you,” Hilt is saying. They both have their hands on their hips as they look down at Catch like a couple of disapproving grannies.

  “How long has it been…?”

  “… got written up last week…”

  “First?” Catch croaks, blinking at his best friend. He struggles to sit up.

  But First isn’t here.

  This is Station Seven. Catch and Hilt are on Station Seven. First is out in the deep, all three of them reassigned this quarter.

  First can’t be here.

  Which means…

  “Fuck… I’m so fucked up…”

  The First hallucination gets in his face. “Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?” Then Catch’s arms are seized by a pair of giant hands and yanked upward, and his body follows, wobbly and weak, as the First-who-is-not-First drags him from his bed and across the room.

  Hilt stands back, hands still on his hips, his service cap pulled low over his eyes, watching. And suddenly Catch’s cube comes into focus around them. He perceives it, and himself, the way anyone else would—with distaste.

  The disarray. The broken tablet on the floor. The stale must of sex and sweat and unwashed clothes.

  The thin cuts on his arm, dried with scabby blood.

  He’s hauled into the tiny bathroom and tossed into an ice-cold shower. He doesn’t have the strength or the will—or the gross motor skills—to put up much of a protest. The officer standing over him slaps his face, hard. “Get your shit the fuck together, Trist.”

  Trist.

  Only one person ever calls him that.

  “Nuh… no… it can’t be you…” Catch’s tongue feels too big, his mouth too dry as he struggles to make words, to swallow.

  “It can, and it is. Flew in this morning, along with half the fucking fleet. Did you not hear that siren? It’s not a drill. Every operable Crasher on Six and Seven is being mobilized. Seven’s taking on a shitload of personnel from ships in the area that are being called in. Civilians, too. Cruisers, research ships, whatever the hell is out there, it’s coming in.”

  “Civilians aren’t allowed on Seven,” Catch says stupidly, struggling to keep up.

  First just tosses him a towel with a snort of disgust and strides out of the bathroom.

  Catch follows as fast as he can, dripping wet, blinking, trying to see straight as he wraps the towel around his hips. “The Crashers? They’re sending out all the Starcrashers?” Catch swipes a fistful of his dirty clothes from Hilt’s hand and starts getting dressed, vaguely registering that Hilt’s been trying to tidy his cube. “Are you going? If you’re going, I’m going.”

  First and Hilt exchange a look Catch can’t even begin to comprehend in his current state. His thoughts are too slow, his edges dulled, his vision still fuzzy around the edges.

  “No one’s been cleared to fly since eleven hundred,” Hilt informs him. “Special Forces only. Rangers will be deployed soon.”

  Rangers.

  That hits a raw, festering nerve. Catch was once a Ranger. Still is, technically, just not on active duty.

  But that doesn’t mean they can’t call him up.

  He picks up his tablet, but it’s dead, the screen badly cracked. He looks at the clock on his wall; almost fifteen hundred.

  He slept all fucking day.

  “We’re awaiting orders,” Hilt says. “There’s a meeting in an hour.”

  “Yeah, and your ass better be at it,” First puts in. “Which means you’ve got time to shave and scrape your brains off the walls or whatever the fuck you’ve gotta do before you report.”

  “They have to give us our wings back,” Catch says, sounding way the hell more sure about this than he feels—at least, where he’s concerned. He’ll be totally fucking stunned if they don’t make First a pilot again; can’t even believe they kept him grounded as long as they did. “They’ll tell us at the meeting. If they need Crasher pilots, they can’t keep us grounded. They’d be better off—” He stops short at the look on Hilt’s face.

  Hilt tips his chin toward First, and Catch notices, for the first time, that First is wearing his black service jumper. His pilot’s outfit.

  Complete with black-and-silver wings stitched above the insignia.

  “Told you. I flew in this morning.”

  “Flew…” Catch can’t quite wrap his head around the word, though it should mean everything to him.

  Once upon a time, it did.

  But he just blinks, foggily, at his best friend, at those shiny wings above his lieutenant’s insignia.

  Lieutenant.

  First’s been promoted.

  Catch swallows thickly… resolve hardening in his throat like a rock he can’t quite choke down. So unaccustomed to this feeling; the sudden whim taking hold, solidifying into something essential. Into a sense of fucking purpose.

  Like something actually matters again.

  “Wherever you’re going, I’m going.”

  First says nothing as Catch digs through his closet for a clean shirt. A button-up, like Hilt is wearing.

  “They have to give me my wings back, too. You told them that, right? Adam?” He turns to find First gone, the door sliding shut in his wake, and Hilt still watching him. “The hell’s he going?”

  “You’ve got worse problems than all that shit.” Hilt’s tone is a strange blend of caution, warning, and sympathy. “Those ships that just came in? Your girl’s on one of them.”

  Catch just stands there, half-dressed, unable to process this. He didn’t even say her name, but they both know exactly who Hilt’s talking about.

  Hilt pats him on the ribs and heads for the door as Catch struggles to wrap his head around it. Lana… here… on his station.

  Right now.

  “She’s not my girl,” he manages to say, but Hilt is already gone.

  Get DEEPER

  About the Author

  Jaine Diamond is the author of the Dirty rockstar romance series and the DEEP erotic romance series. She is fond of writing the love stories of built and badass men endowed with massive hearts, and strong, complex women she’d love to have a cocktail with.

  She lives in beautiful Vancouver, Canada with her real-life romantic hero (Mr. Diamond) and their little girl, where she reads, writes, and drinks copious amounts of tea.

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