“This incident will be stricken from your file. But if you act up again, make no mistake, I will bounce you right back down here to cuddle up with your new friend.” He nods at the shuttlehiker, who’s still passed out, snoring sloppily. “You don’t want to get on my bad side, Marsden. I don’t care whose sister you are. You follow my orders or I drop you from DEEP so fast you’ll be back on solid ground before you know what happened.”
The words come out smoothly, a recitation he’s uttered numerous times, to numerous trainees, over numerous infractions. Catch knows how to step into a room and take control. To use his bearing, his tone, his mere presence, to command respect, compliance, obedience. If he’s honest, the training core suits him better than the cockpit ever did. He was made for this, being a trainer. Though the words, this time, are a lie. It would take a hell of a lot for him to drop First’s sister before the end of the quarter, to eject her from the station, even if she was failing miserably.
There are certain things Catch would put up with only for his best friend, and his sister’s inadequate performance will be one of them, if it has to be.
Even so, he’d just as soon intimidate an adequate performance out of her.
“Yes, Sir.” Catch detects the hint of a tremble in her chin, but her voice remains firm. He releases her and she takes a discreet step back. “I won’t be any trouble, Sir.”
Get DEEP
Sneak Peek: DEEPER
DEEPER (DEEP #2)
This time… Catch wants it all.
For months, Sergeant “Catch” Durant has scraped out an existence without her. Cadet Lana Marsden. The girl of his kink-fueled dreams. Sweet. Submissive. And utterly in control.
The girl who used the safeword and walked away.
For months, Lana’s tried to carry on with her duty—her mission into the deep. She’s tried to let Catch go… and failed.
When a state of emergency forces their paths to collide, there’s only so long Lana can resist the man who brought her to her knees. Only so long Catch can hold himself back from all he really wants.
Harder.
Darker.
Deeper…
Catch is back.
DEEPER
CHAPTER ONE
The girl has short, dark hair, medium-dark skin, and a cunning, cutting look in her eyes that can only be described as catlike. She’s short, maybe five-three, and looks even shorter with her curvy, compact frame. Other than her general age, the fact that she’s a female member of the International Space Corps, and the fact that she’s strikingly, almost disturbingly pretty, she has nothing at all in common with Lana Marsden.
Lana…
Fair, slender Lana, with the long, soft brown hair and the deep blue eyes. Lana… who had whole galaxies in her eyes.
Lana.
Catch takes a deep, deep breath as he blinks at the girl in his wavering vision. Those calculating eyes cutting through him, finding him lacking. Pathetic. He’s damaged goods, and she knows it.
No. Nothing in common with Lana.
Maybe that’s why he’s here.
But then, of course, there’s the leather. The straps that hold the girl, bent over, bound to the desk. Those remind him of Lana… fragments still in his head, still burning him up, smoldering like live embers under his skin, no matter how he tries to snuff them out.
Drugs. Abstinence. Denial.
Memories…
Her faint vanilla scent. The sound of her desperate cries, her panting breaths, her soft sighs. The feel of her skin, soft and hot, against him.
Lana… bound to the hook in his ceiling, to the hook in his wall. In a collar and cuffs. On a leash.
Lana…
“Harder,” the girl says, her eyes on Catch.
Blaze steps forth and smacks her with the black leather crop. Right across the ass, both cheeks; leaving another pink mark alongside the others and making the girl buck and gasp in pleasure-pain. Her eyes gleam with satisfaction. She smiles.
She smiles at Catch, and the room does an ugly spin-out.
He shuts his eyes, hard, black holes imploding behind his eyelids. Needing to escape this place. The cube, so dank yet vibrant; close and hot; stifling and cool. Large, then small. There’s not enough room. He’s so high, his eyes roll in his head when he scrapes them open. It’s the Pull or the Zag or the Exotica, he doesn’t know which. Which pill was the one that put it over the top.
“Do you like her?”
He realizes Blaze has asked him a question, that it’s dangling in the air between them, but it could’ve been ten minutes ago. His tone is absent, his focus on the girl—the girl whose sharp, dark eyes are still focused on Catch.
And Catch can’t even compute the question.
Like.
Her.
What’s to like?
What’s to like about any girl, no matter how pretty she looks in bondage, if she isn’t Lana Marsden?
Blaze looks over at him, cocking a coppery eyebrow when Catch doesn’t answer. He stands at the edge of the light, his pale, sculpted face pitted with shadow, twitching and vibrating like he’s not even real, just some viz model beaming out over a bad datastream.
It’s the Pull. It’s stretching everything out; the high, the need, the hours. Making everything else unreal. How long has it been since he entered this room? Half an hour? Half the night?
He can’t unscramble the time inside his skull.
“I think he’s tripping out,” the girl says, laughter behind her words, but she doesn’t laugh. It’s hollow-echo-quiet in his head as Blaze frowns and strikes her again, the snap of the crop-whip against naked flesh too crisp, too loud.
The girl winces and Blaze says, “Shh.” He runs his hand, gently, over the marks on her backside, and when she looks up at him, finally… the naked devotion, raw and tender, still fresh, so like the way Lana used to look at Catch… he feels bile rise up from deep in his stomach.
He swallows it down.
But he can’t seem to move as he
