UNEXPECTED
by Jordan Demaine

As manager of the Pleasure Palace, the premier (and only) adult entertainment club on a space station that sees a dozen new ships dock every cycle, Javier has built a profitable business, but there are lines he won't cross. He’ll sell fantasy, flirtation and spectacle, but never at the cost of someone's dignity. So when Lev Drenn applies for work as a dancer, Javier turns him down flat.

Lev is beautiful, desperate, and heavily pregnant. Half-human and half-Auralune, carrying a child whose mixed genetics could make him valuable to the wrong sorts of people, Lev is exactly the sort of person Javier refuses to turn into a curiosity or a commodity. Sending him away feels like the right thing to do, until Javier learns that Lev, needing credits to survive, has taken a far more dangerous job in a brothel run by a man with far fewer scruples.

Javier’s attempt to help only earns him Lev’s fury. But pride doesn’t buy meals or safe places to sleep, and when Javier discovers Lev is homeless and nearly out of options, he makes an offer neither of them expected: a cot in a quiet office at the Pleasure Palace, no strings attached.

What begins as an uneasy truce slowly becomes something warmer. Javier and Lev begin to see each other clearly, but the station is not a place that lets rare things go unnoticed for long. When Lev is abducted by mercenaries hoping to sell his unborn child to a genetic-engineering firm, Javier is forced into action, teaming up with Irfan, one of the club’s sharpest dancers and Lev's fiercest ally.

As the pressure mounts, Javier faces choices that challenge his most deeply held beliefs: how far he’s willing to bend his rules, what protection truly means, and whether a love he'd given up hoping for could actually be real. For Lev, trusting someone else with his future—and his child’s—may be the greatest risk of all.

Tender, suspenseful, and hopeful, this is a story about found family, chosen principles, and the quiet courage it takes to believe that even in the darkest corners of space, something gentle can grow.

AMAZON