Crushed (City of Eldrich Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

gotten into today.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
    W hen Meaghan got home, Russ’s car wasn’t in the garage and she couldn’t smell anything cooking. Since he’d started planning his food truck business, Russ had gotten sloppy about regular mealtimes.
    In the kitchen, a woman she knew to be a witch, and her two teenage apprentices, sat at the table watching the open refrigerator, smiles on their faces.
    “Hi, I’m home,” Meaghan said.
    Nobody noticed. She looked around the fridge door.
    Shirtless, shoeless, and wearing a pair of tight, low-slung jeans, Jhoro bent, peering into the depths of the refrigerator. He had the kind of body that made even plumber’s crack look good. Not the excessive definition favored by Hollywood, but the lean wiry strength of a man who’d spent his life hunting for his food with a bone spear and a stone knife.
    He stood up, a covered bowl in one hand while the other hand flipped silky, blond hair out of his face. Another witch, Marnie, who was a hair stylist, had spent days patiently picking and combing out the mane of matted dreadlocks Jhoro had worn in Fahraya. He shook his head and the golden, newly unsnarled hair spilled to the middle of his back.
    The witches sighed in unison.
    Meaghan laughed out loud, but still no one noticed her. She appeared to be the only woman in Eldrich immune to Jhoro’s sexual charisma. Objectively, she understood his appeal. He was flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous. But when Meaghan had first met him, he’d been grimy with dirt and blood and soot and had body odor that made her eyes water. One of the first things she’d had to do when he moved in with her and Russ was give him a good scrubbing.
    And apparently she was the only woman in town who believed he was gay. Finn, his mate, had been killed in the rush to escape the destruction of Fahraya. Despite the megawatt smile and come-hither looks he gave everyone he met, male and female, Meaghan knew he was grieving for Finn and would be for a long time.
    But even if she didn’t want to drag him into her bed, Jhoro still affected her in a way she found horribly disconcerting. Not ten years ago, she would have been lusting with everyone else. Now she wanted to make him a cup of cocoa and tell him to clean his room.
    Meaghan had a mommy crush.
    Her newly awakened maternal instincts had been rebuffed by Jamie, so Meaghan threw it all at Jhoro and he sucked it up like a dry sponge. His own mother had died giving birth to him, and V’hren had never really believed Jhoro was his. John had loved him like a son, but Zhara, John’s wife and Jamie’s mother, while kind, had never warmed to Jhoro the same way. Jamie, his cousin, had never let him forget it.
    He called Meaghan “Mama,” and every time she felt her heart swell even as she rolled her eyes and told him not to call her that.
    Marnie strolled into the kitchen, wearing a sheer tank top and cutoffs short enough to qualify as panties. Slender with a pierced nose and black hair in a sharp bob, she normally favored ironic T-shirts and baggy cargo shorts. She had cut Meaghan’s short silvering hair about a month earlier and done such a good job that Meaghan had scheduled a standing monthly appointment.
    Marnie walked up to Jhoro and reached her arm around him. She grabbed his bottom, pulling him against her. He wrapped his hand gently in her hair, pulled her head back, and bent to kiss her.
    Meaghan felt the weather change in the kitchen. The trio seated at the table glared. One of the apprentices looked like she was trying not to cry.
    Okay, Meaghan thought. Not gay. Clearly, he was comfortable playing for either team. Although not for long, because he and Marnie were about to be blasted into grease spots.
    Then—and Meaghan wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it—he lifted his head and gave the fuming witches his movie-star smile. They sighed and smiled back.
    So, now, the two men she lived with—her brother and this wild-man surrogate son—were each