Free Mad for Love: Even Gods Fall in Love, Book 2 by Lynne Connolly Page B

be bespelled?”
    D’Argento raised a brow. “Breaking out could be difficult. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Mother and daughter sorceresses?”
    Blaize bit back his instinctive response. Aurelia wasn’t a sorceress. Every part of his highly enhanced instinct screamed that. When he’d felt the spell surround him, luring him in, he didn’t resist. He’d entered the web smiling. “The mother is the threat.”
    “You would say that if you’re under an enchantment,” d’Argento said gently.
    “I’ve read Aurelia. From the inside, and no, that isn’t some distasteful innuendo. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I can break the spell whenever I wish.”
    D’Argento chuckled low, and reached for the decanter. “I think that deserves a toast. So you can.” He poured a glass of wine and raised it, smiling. “To madness. The one thing that can destroy man’s well-laid plans.” He drank deeply. Blaize joined him, and with a reluctant smile, Lyndhurst raised his glass.
    “I go mad,” Blaize said coolly. “I stop drinking alcohol. In a day, two at the most, I enter into my true self. Nothing can hold me then, and nothing can stop me. Least of all civilisation. No spell binds me, no woman and no man.”
    The condition terrified him. Not that he would dream of telling anyone that. The power came from outside him.
    He could drive others to madness, lead people to do insane things. So he kept drinking. “Leave Aurelia alone. She’s mine.”
    Lyndhurst raised a brow. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t discard her completely.”
    Blaize inclined his head in a nod. It would appear odd if Lyndhurst abandoned the field immediately.
    Aurelia was not in league with her mother. His stomach churned even to consider such a thing. However, she might be under the same thrall that occupied him. In which case he’d free her and they would see what remained. But nobody would take her from him. He’d fight like a wounded dog for its offspring, maddened by pain and loss.
    “Bespelled or not, I can see what is needed. We need to concentrate on the dowager, first.”
    Lyndhurst took a turn about the room, as if unable to remain in one place for long. He pivoted on his heel and strode toward the fire, then toward the window and back again. Blaize exchanged a telling glance with d’Argento. The man was quick-tempered, prone to rash anger.
    “The dowager uses Aurelia to hook the fish. It seems to me she’s been singularly successful in that regard. Mars and Bacchus on one hook is a remarkable haul.” Blaize spread his hands. “Is she a Titan, then?” He could believe it. They’d had no luck tracing the major female Titans. Most remained at large, unhindered.
    Lyndhurst paused in his restless pacing to glare down at Blaize. “I suggest that in public at least we still behave as bitter rivals for the hand of the fair Lady Aurelia. If the dowager thinks us divided, then she’ll behave with less circumspection. She could even try to set us against each other. But we must not fail to communicate in private. Agreed?”
    D’Argento accepted immediately.
    “And I want her brother,” Lyndhurst continued. “Her mother is a sorceress or an immortal, that’s for sure, even if we don’t know what she is. Do we believe her brother escaped? He’s five years older than Aurelia. You know what age that makes him.”
    D’Argento’s answer dropped into the silence like a stone in a pond. “Thirty.” The age that the reborn Olympians would be, give a year or two. D’Argento nodded. “I’ll find him. That’s what I do best. He went abroad, did he not? Then I leave in the morning. He is a key to this puzzle and I want him.”
    Blaize nodded. “I will woo Aurelia properly and while I’m doing so, you may trace her brother. I want him found, d’Argento.”
    “Never fear, he won’t escape me.”
    “And I’m a spare foot, I suppose?” Lyndhurst said sarcastically. “I have no part in your well-oiled plan?”
    “On the