Anticipated Angel, Copyright © 2022 Laura Navarre. All rights reserved.

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  This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  The Discovery

  The damned flying snake came winging at him out of nowhere. Dex’s sole warning of imminent peril was the sibilant hiss that sliced the jungle night.

  Coupled with the hot puff of displaced air against his sweating face.

  Sensing the deadly shadow arrowing toward him through the murk, Dex swept up his blaster and fired. A pulse of crimson fire seared his night vision to smithereens and left him all but blind. The beam scorched with a shoom! through scaled wings and powerful venom-green coils.

  Longer than his leg and thicker than his own muscled thigh, the thing dropped from the sky to crash, charred and smoking, at Dex’s booted feet.

  Where it writhed, enraged and thrashing like blazes. Only to rear up and spray from its fanged jaws a spigot of steaming venom. Dex twisted aside from the vile spray with a curse—an evasion that barely saved him from permanent blindness.

  Tingling with adrenaline, heart slamming against his chest, battle sense screaming in his ears, he leveled his blaster and shot the damn snake again—this time at point-blank range—to be certain of his kill.

  Only when he’d incinerated the loathsome worm did Dex pivot, skin crawling, to clear his six. Because flying snakes were known to hunt in pairs.

  After a swift but thorough recon revealed no new threat, he cautiously lowered his weapon, letting the humming tension of combat unspool with a careful sigh.

  Too bloody right, he was careful. He was always bloody careful.

  Because his training would permit nothing less.

  After all, the unrelenting rigor of his training was the primary reason he’d just become the highest scoring candidate ever to survive the imperial army’s ruthless and frequently deadly entrance exams. And his success in that dangerous endeavor, happening hard on the heels of his brother’s precipitous plunge from grace, had just made Dex the only son galactic tyrant Maximus Draven hadn’t yet repudiated.

  Which was the entire farking reason Dex was stumbling about in the dark after midnight on an alien world in the first damn place. After sacrificing his entire adolescence to an ironclad adherence to the Empire’s brutal code of military morals, Dex Draven needed a woman in the worst possible way.

  At least that’s what he’d been telling himself robotically and insistently all summer he needed.

  Even when what he really needed—what he needed the way a deep space fighter pilot needs a tankful of oxygen and an arsenal of torpedoes—was to know how it would feel to finally indulge all those illegal impulses. Those impulses he’d been fighting to suppress all summer.

  Those impulses for his best friend Ben Nero.

  Ben with his secret smile and his diabolical wit. Ben with his incendiary temper and his flamboyant charm. Ben with his silken skin and his silky hair and his sultry eyes the dusky purple that spilled across the midnight sky of Paragon.

  That same span of sky arced over Dex now, as he resumed his wary journey under the swollen rose and silver spheres of the planet’s gas giant neighbors. Beneath that celestial display, he slipped through the shadowy jungle of this alien world, his blaster set to singe any overbold shadow panther or vine snake intent on making Dex its dinner.

  Half spiritual sanctuary, half wildlife refuge, the planet of Paragon had firmly declared its neutrality in the looming galactic war between Mogadon and Valyria. Still, this was no world to reward a man for carelessness.

  A lesson that blasted flying reptile had just reinforced.

  All the gods grant you’re deep asleep in your dorm tonight, Ben. Occupying that damnably dangerous telepathic brain of yours with dreams of all those girls you left pining for you back home on Valyria.

  Rather than sensing these wayward, utterly inappropriate fantasies of mine.

  Because Dex would rather be disemboweled by a shadow panther or swallowed whole by a vine snake than ever betray to his best friend the merest hint of the way Dex truly felt about him.

  The way Dex wasn’t supposed to feel about him.

  The way Dex was determined never to feel about him. Or any other man.

  Damn it to all twelve hells.

  Because Dex Draven—born into the Mogadon Empire’s ruling class, steeped in the strictures of duty and protocol until he’d all but choked on the dregs—emphatically refused to follow his brother’s descent to scandal and disgrace.

  Not when Dex was barely a whisker away from achieving that elusive dream he’d been chasing all his life. The dream of finally making his formidable father proud. Not when he was a newly sworn space cadet in the imperial army that was the galaxy’s supreme power.

  A power that crucified imperial soldiers for legally prohibited same-sex unions.

  Especially not when his own father was that power’s most committed morality enforcer. In fact, Dex was well aware the man considered that draconian interdict against male-male liaisons the crowning achievement of his entire command.

  Deep in the Stygian darkness, a shadow panther snarled. Dex sliced a wary look through the vine-draped trees, palmed the blaster’s familiar heft, and quickened his pace down the twisting path.

  Still, not even the perennial menace of Paragon’s feral and ravenously carnivorous wildlife could divert him from the quicksand of his thoughts for long.

  Dex had shed his own blood and choked on his own tears to prove himself worthy of wearing the Mogadon uniform. He’d suffered and fasted and fought—even killed a man in the combat trials—all to secure his coveted slot at the Empire Academy. And when he’d gained his majority last month, he’d finally been eligible to enlist. Now he was determined to prove to his damn father he could be the Mogadon male the old war dog was always challenging and bullying and demanding he become.

  Even if it killed him.

  All of which meant this unrelenting bombardment of sweaty, sticky, superheated dreams he’d been suppressing all summer for Ben Nero—dreams like the one that had just jolted him awake, panting and desperate, with his own aching cock gripped in his pumping fist—would never be more than dreams.

  Because they can’t be.

  Not ever.

  Clenching his jaw, Dex stalked with grim resolve down the perilous path that wound from the dorm cabins to the men’s shower house. A path he’d learned by heart here at the next-gen leaders’ camp where he’d spent his past three summers—dutifully doing his bit to promote interracial tolerance across the galaxy.

  That same laudable goal had summoned Ben to Paragon. Ben, the talented scion of the psychic Valyrian race. Even though Valyria was militant Mogadon’s galactic rival.

  That first summer, the two of them had predictably loathed each other on sight. From Day One, Dex despised and distrusted the slippery Valyrian with his telepath tricks and his feral face and his violet eyes burning with sullen resentment while the golden boy at leaders’ camp—Dex, the Indomitable’s son—walked away from the orientation contests with all the accolades.

  They’d spent weeks circling and needling each other, with Dex routinely stinging under the lash of Ben’s acerbic tongue. Ben mocked him in a way no one in the galaxy ever dared mock the tyrant’s son. For his part, Dex hazed the wretch relentlessly. Swamp toads the size of dinner plates secreted in the Valyrian’s bed, salt instead of sugar spoiling his morning chaco, every stitch of Ben’s clothing stolen from the shower house.

  Until the night Dex stumbled on the Valyrian kid getting the galactic shit kicked out of his scrawny arse by a brace of Paragon’s local toughs. The ugly backwoods ambush was six on one, the local gangs fought dirty, and Ben Nero shouldn’t have stood a chance. But the scrappy runt just wouldn’t bloody quit. And the intermittent sting of painful electric sparks shooting from his fingers—a prelude to the deadly psi fire his telepathic race wielded as adults—was inflaming the infuriated bullies to real violence.

  Like any proper Mogadon, Dex relished a rousing combat. But he demanded a fair fight.

  And Ben Nero wasn’t getting one.

  Which was how Dex found himself, impossibly, charging into battle in Ben Nero’s defense.

  A hail of punishing blows from Dex’s combat-trained fists and feet, punctuated with stinging showers of Ben’s psychic sparks, soon had the bullies in full rout.

  When it was over, Ben hadn’t even spoken. He’d just cradled Dex’s battered and throbbing knuckles gently between his own deft fingers. And healed Dex’s injuries with a sin

gle psychic touch that left Dex breathless and tingling.

  That was the night their improbable friendship was born. A friendship nurtured, despite the growing animus between their rival races, over three sweaty summers at leaders’ camp. Admittedly, war or no war, Dex had grown fond of the imp. But he’d never wanted Ben Nero… inappropriately… until they met up this summer.

  Their final summer.

  Now the shrill trill of flesh-eating dragon-birds pierced the secretive hush of night. Searching the shadows, Dex sucked in a cautious breath and made haste. Humid air, laced with the deadly sweetness of night-blooming lotus, stole through his lungs. Even a distant whiff of that addictive intoxicant was sufficient to set his head spinning.

  That whiff did nothing at all to ease the hot ache that kept his shaft throbbing.

  The airborne aphrodisiac was one of many reasons the entire camp imposed a strict curfew at sundown. A curfew his latest erotic dream was now driving Dex to violate. Even though, like any duty-bound Mogadon male—not to mention his father’s son—Dex prided himself on following every inflexible edict.

  Brace up, soldier. All you need is a blasted cold shower. It’s become a bloody habit at this point, hasn’t it? Better to bathe in liquid nitrogen than insult and alienate your best friend with these damned filthy fantasies you can’t seem to suppress.

  The dark tangle of trees fell away. In the clearing ahead, the polymer cube of the shower house loomed large. As he strode toward that oasis of safety, the heat of the jungle night clung to his sweaty skin and made the synthetic fabric of his sleeping trousers stick to his thighs.

  Soon his thighs would be sticky with more than sweat. Because he’d spent more nights than he cared to acknowledge—even to himself—jacking off alone in the shower house after another electric dream of Ben Nero.

  His breath roughened as he keyed open the maglock. The shower house door swung open with a soft chirp. Jupiter, just the thought of wrapping his soapy fist around his pulsing length, imagining the silken heat of Ben’s insolent mouth encasing his cock, and letting the pleasure pound through him…

  By all the gods of Olympus, he was rigid nearly to bursting.

  Blind and deaf to everything but the forbidden pleasure of a fantasy he ought to deny himself but couldn’t, he slipped into the building’s steamy heat, the shelter glowing saffron with the stored light of solar panels.

  In fact, he was already so deeply enmeshed in the coils of his favorite fantasy—the one where he wasn’t Mogadon and Ben wasn’t Valyrian and they could be together in all the ways he’d never dare admit he burned for—that he’d unbuckled his blaster, shed his sleeping tunic, and was about to shuck his boots and trousers in a dressing cubicle before he registered the siss of water on tile.

  Punctuated by the wet rhythmic slap of flesh on flesh. The telltale sound of a sexually frustrated male getting himself off.

  A sound with which Dex himself, given the summer he was having, was considerably more than intimate.

  Savage as a Mogadon cave bear, frustration clawed through his chest. Was there no place on this whole wretched planet a man could grasp a moment’s peace? In zero mood for company, he crushed his tunic in a desperate fist and powered for the exit.

  “Oh gods…” The groan of a shockingly familiar voice, barely audible through the billow of steam over the partition that separated the cubicles from the shower block, froze him in his tracks. “Need you so much… need to feel you inside me… oh gods… oh please… oh Dex.”

  Great gods on the mountain.

  That—that’s Ben.

  His best friend. His secret torment. His forbidden obsession.

  Jacking off in the shower.

  Jacking off and fantasizing about Dex.

  Realization slammed through him like an asteroid collision and hammered his feet to the floor. Riveted, Dex stared at the partition. The tunic slipped unheeded from his fingers to pool on the damp tiles. Mouth dry, heart hammering, Dex found his feet carrying his violently alert and tingling body toward the illicit sound without conscious direction from his brain. As though the rasp of his best friend’s moan had him locked in a tractor beam.

  A wall of steam buffeted his face and beaded his skin. When the mist parted and rolled away, Dex saw him.

  Ben.

  All the gods knew he’d been scrupulously careful all summer never to see Ben Nero naked. Now, by all that was good and holy in the universe, he couldn’t stop looking.

  Slick with steam and ropes of sudsy soap, Ben stood braced with one hand against the wall and his dark head bent. Supple sinew flexing under smooth pale skin as he fisted well over a handspan of swollen cock. Gasping, trembling, jerky with need as he neared his climax.

  “Dex,” he moaned. “You want me to beg for you? I’m begging. Harder.”

  Well, Dex was only human.

  Feet bolted to the floor, hard enough to explode and just about having a damn heart attack, a noise slipped out of him that sounded pretty close to a whimper of sheer yearning.

  Quick as a moorcat, Ben twisted toward him, hand frozen on all that taut hard length. Through long ribbons of soaked black hair, his purple eyes were startled—then smoking with sudden heat.

  Dex stared into that incendiary gaze, fairly certain his mouth was hanging open. But lacking the wit to do anything but gape.

  “Well?” His best friend’s voice was husky with need and just about the sexiest sound Dex had ever heard. “Are you just going to stand there and watch?”

  My commission, Dex reminded himself desperately. The interdict. My duty to the Empire. Oh gods—oh gods—my father.

  But he might as well try to stop an asteroid collision with his bare hands. Dex had been poring over battlefield tactics and deep space strategy since he was barely old enough to read the words. And in that moment, he grasped the essential truth of this particular skirmish. He’d lost not only the battle but the entire infernal war. Because no power in the galaxy was going to stop him from shucking the sleeping trousers tented over his raging boner right there and—

  The sudden slam of the shower house door flying open made him jump a good three cubits in the air. A pair of roughhousing juniors, laughing and jostling, tumbled into the building and fell brawling into an adjacent cubicle.

  Ben bit out a low curse and raked a hand through his sodden hair. Frustration flashed in his gaze like ultraviolet lightning. But he never looked away from Dex.

  Waiting.

  To see what he’d do.

  To see if Dex would close the distance between them and do what it now appeared they both so clearly craved.

  One sable brow arched in silent challenge.

  Dex dragged his head together, tore his gaze away, lit out of there like a scalded sand-runner, and didn’t stop running until he gained the cold comfort of his solitary dorm.

  Chapter Two

  The Dare

  Still damp and dripping under the tunic and breeches he’d dragged over his desperately aroused body, breathless and panting from pounding through the jungle after his frenzied best friend, Ben Nero stood on the step outside Dex’s dormitory cabin and glared at the locked door.

  Dex never locked his door. They’d been coming and going from each other’s dorms day and night for three summers straight.

  Sure, Dex was arrogant, aggressive, pigheaded, surly, introverted, hypercompetitive, a compulsive overachiever. The golden boy at leaders’ camp. In other words, a typical farking Mogadon.

  Nero had hated him on sight. Until everything changed.

  Since the unforgettable night Dex waded into battle to defend him, Nero had been secretly crushing on the guy.

  Now—this summer—their final summer when they both gained their majority and left leaders’ camp behind forever, the sexual dynamic between them had torqued so much tighter. Their always-unspoken chemistry had condensed into an alchemical compound so volatile it was practically pyrophoric. With Dex grown into something between a deadly predator and a tawny god, Nero knew his secret summer crush stood in acute danger of developing into a connection fathoms deeper.

  And far more lethal to his guarded heart.

 

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