Spellbound Falls [5] For the Love of Magic Read Online Free PDF

disposition of its master.” Mac turned serious. “Which brings us back to Dad’s question of why you’ve asked the three of us for help, when it’s
your
calling to protect Bottomless and the surrounding wilderness.”
    “Dad?” Titus repeated before Duncan could answer, only to close his eyes on a silent groan. “Henry finally got to you.”
    “No,” Mac said with a chuckle. “Ella did, although likely at Henry’s urging.” He shook his head. “You try arguing with a three-year-old cherub. Or have you forgotten that Carolina had you wrapped around her princess pinky finger at three
months
?”
    Only because it had taken him that long to stop blaming his daughter for nearly killing his wife, Titus remembered as he turned to stare out the windshield. And it had been Nicholas—a mere child himself and Carolina’s self-appointed protector—who had finally brought him to his senses. Not that he knew how a boy who’d been spewed from a whale onto a local beach and raised by the island midwife had had the gonads to call his king—much less the man who had built Atlantis—an idiot.
    “You don’t deserve the miracle your wife nearly died giving you,” Titus recalled the seven-year-old saying when the boy had caught him standing over Carolina’s crib the day they’d learned Rana would live. “Her highness isn’t still weak from childbirth; she’s heartsick that you want nothing to do with Lina.” Nicholas had crowded Titus out of the way to pick up Carolina, protectively holding the week-old infant to his chest as he’d glared up at his towering king. “So why don’t you just walk into the sea and never come back, and save me the trouble of killing you the moment I’m big enough.”
    Which would have been only a few years, at the rate the boy had been growing.
    Despite moving Nicholas’s adoptive mother and father into the palace as their family healer and gardener, and installing Nicholas in the bedroom next to Carolina’s as her bodyguard, the boy had kept up the verbal attacks until the morning Titus had nearly walked past a whispered conversation taking place in the garden. He’d stood frozen behind a tree and listened to Nicholas pleading with Rana to let him help her run off with Maximilian and Carolina, the boy promising he would find someplace beautiful to raise her children where everyone truly loved one another.
    But it had been Rana’s response that had nearly brought Titus to his knees.
Unconditional love
, she’d told Nicholas,
sometimes required an awful lot of patience
. She’d then patted the boy’s scowling cheek, saying she had faith that
time
and a few baby belly laughs would soften Titus’s heart. And it so happened, she’d gone on to assure Nicholas, that her big powerful husband had an infinite amount of time to remember that small, everyday miracles were all that really mattered.
    Somewhat similar to what she’d said this morning. Except what in Hades had happened to the
unconditional
part? Because to his thinking, living in separate houses while he was supposed to explore the everyday wonders of the world was damned conditional and not the least bit patient.
    “That’s why dealing with Lina for thirty-one years,” Nicholas said as Titus merely continued staring out the windshield, “made me decide I’m only having sons.”
    Mac snorted. “Assuming Providence even wants your soul in exchange.”
    Want it,
Titus thought with his own silent snort. Providence already owned all six foot seven inches, two hundred and twenty pounds of the warrior. And that was why to this day Nicholas continued being his voice of reason—more often than not as direct and insolent as he’d been as a child. Which had Titus wondering why he hadn’t listened when, just days before he’d left on his mission last November, Nicholas had reminded him that even gods needed to take time out of their busy schedules to play with their wives.
    Poseidon’s teeth; he’d apparently been