Crushed (City of Eldrich Book 2) by Laura Kirwan Read Free Book Online

agree. But I can’t quit until a challenge is made by somebody they want.”
    The challenger, John explained, didn’t have to be someone in the same family. Or a man. Women had been kings in the past. John’s father could have easily looked outside his family to choose his heir. “If he had done that,” John told her, “he would have saved us all this trouble.”
    The tendency to hereditary succession had developed out of inertia more than anything else. A good leader tended to pass those characteristics on to his or her children.
    “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Meaghan said.
    “Something is broken? Are we still talking about kings?” John had been speaking English for nearly two decades, but sometimes he could be annoyingly literal.
    Fights to the death notwithstanding, being a Fahrayan king was more like at-will employment than a divine mandate to rule. V’hren had attempted to rule like a human king and the Fahrayans wanted no more of that. Heredity was not in John’s favor on this. After all, he was V’hren’s younger brother. If one brother went bad, so could the other.
    It was only a matter of time until a new leader rose. Or several. John was seeing the growth of several factions and it worried him. But whoever ended up as the new king, it wouldn’t be Jhoro. Heredity wasn’t helping him either. He had originally seemed like the logical choice to succeed his father, but the very fact that he was V’hren’s son now made the Fahrayans mistrust him.
    It was so bad that Jhoro had almost no contact with his people, including those who had fought with him in the hills and who had been so loyal to him in Fahraya. Meaghan had initially thought he wanted to live with her and Russ to protect her, and that was part of it, but basically he had nowhere else to go.
    Another stray. Another lost boy. Which probably played no small part in spurring Meaghan’s mommy crush.
    For now, a fragile peace existed and nobody had been killed or hurt. Yet. But John could only protect them for so long. The modern world beckoned, terrifying but enticing.
    Meaghan’s stomach growled loudly. Where the hell was Russ? It was almost seven. She eyed the phone book. A pizza maybe? She liked a little place downtown that Russ eschewed because they used dough conditioners in the crust and didn’t use hand-crafted mozzarella.
    Sometimes she wanted to hit him with a Happy Meal, he was such a food snob. She opened the refrigerator to see if she could find any salsa for the chips. She’d give Russ ten more minutes and then she was calling for that pizza.
    Meaghan found the salsa and poured herself another glass of wine, took a sip, then set it down on the counter. She knew that John’s sobriety didn’t require her to abstain too, but she didn’t want to rub his nose in it. She liked wine, but she liked John a lot more. Even if the thought of being with him scared her to death.
    They’d both been celibate for many long years, too wounded in their respective ways to let anyone near them. Even the scant emotional intimacy they had already shared had required serious effort. If it hadn’t been for their ordeal in Fahraya, they’d both still be blushing and stammering, unable to make eye contact. John would be too timid to approach her and Meaghan would be too shut down to let him in.
    They had agreed that neither was ready to start a physical relationship, but they talked on the phone daily. It may have kept them from physical temptation, but if John’s dreams were anything like Meaghan’s . . . when she wasn’t dreaming about giant scorpions attacking her, she was dreaming about attacking John. In all sorts of creative ways. Dream Meaghan and Dream John were getting busy all over town.
    Everyone, including Meaghan and John, assumed they’d hook up eventually. Unless . . . Meaghan hated how her feelings for John reduced her emotional age sometimes to about sixteen. What if he’d met somebody else? He was surrounded by