A Prince on Paper (Reluctant Royals #3)(23)

The children took Nya and Johan to meet their father, Semii, who invited them to tour his grazing land. As they marched through the thicket surrounding the shepherd’s home, Nya pointed out the flora she’d grown up reading about in her Encyclopedia of Thesoloian Plants. Makalele had sometimes taken her out with him as he did his weekend rounds of the village, when her father was busy in the capital and couldn’t complain, and he’d helped her pick them out and compare plants to the printed images.

She’d loved those times, though now she wondered why her grandfather had never mentioned it to her father.

Because he’d known that Father would not want you doing such things. He’d known . . .

Semii spoke with reverence for the land his family had protected for generations, and about how each season brought new troubles, but also new delights. To her surprise, Johan spoke to the man in passable Thesotho. Semii beamed and encouraged him, and then they went back to the family home, where his wife and her father had prepared lunch for everyone.

After lunch, Nya and Johan had started their trek back, talking about things like their favorite films, and whether or not Portia and Tavish had managed to capture a cow. He’d also talked about his brother, briefly but enough to make clear how much he adored the boy. Nya had thought how nice it must be for him, having a sibling he cared for—he wouldn’t know what it was like to be lonely.

“Today was a good day,” she declared as their horses picked their way over the open shrubland on the route back to the palace. “It gives me hope that being back home won’t be so bad.”

Perhaps it was sharing too much, but she was full of delicious food and drunk on fun conversation. Her head buzzed a bit from happiness. This was the feeling she’d had when spending time with Ledi and Portia in New York when she hadn’t been afraid, and what she worried would not be possible in Thesolo.

Will this good feeling last when the wedding festivities are over?

“Do you miss New York yet?” Johan asked.

“I don’t, to be honest. It was . . . too big, I think,” she said, surprised he wanted to know anything about her time in New York given how he’d avoided her there.

He looked at her. “Too big?”

His expression was curious, and it hit her then that Johan traveled all over the world, having exciting adventures. Right now, he was dressed in down-to-earth sexy cowboy cosplay, but everything about his usual persona was the embodiment of “too big.”

Everything? Nya’s cheeks warmed.

“Um. Yes. I could never feel comfortable there. I guess that makes me provincial.” She shrugged. “I did well at school—”

“You were doing an education program, no?”

Nya almost asked how he knew, and figured Portia or Thabiso must have mentioned something.

“Yes. I just wish I’d done so much more, both in school and in everyday life.”

“What did you want to do that you didn’t?” he asked.

Nya was starting to wonder whether Semii had sprinkled magic dust in their food that made Johan suddenly interested in her—then that thought left her cold because she knew some people did put things in your food and the results were generally much worse than a handsome man becoming interested in you.

She glanced at Johan, wary, but then she remembered they were friends now. You could tell friends things and they wouldn’t make fun of you too much.

“I wanted excitement and romance and fun. I thought I would move to New York and be swept up into this glamorous city life.” She sighed. “I wasn’t. To be fair, Ledi did warn me that there was nothing glamorous about grad school.”

“Glamorous New York City life is overrated, unless you enjoy going to boring parties and being talked at by people on cocaine,” Johan declared.

“Oh!” Nya said. “That doesn’t sound fun.”

“It really isn’t.” He patted his horse encouragingly. “Did you eat bagels?”

“Yes.”

“Go to a Broadway show?”

“Once a month! They were all so good!”

His lips curved up. “Did you have fun with Ledi and Portia and Thabiso?”

“Of course!”

“Then it sounds like you did have a glamorous New York City experience, just not the one you see in movies.”

Nya let his words sink in. “You’re right, but I wanted the movie experience. I wanted to be someone other than the person my father had told me I had to be. I felt so trapped here—not by my country, but by what everyone assumed about me because of my father.”

“I know this feeling,” Johan said. “When people think they already know who you are and what you’re capable of.”

“Yes!” Nya adjusted herself on her saddle, having slipped in her excitement at being understood. “I wanted to shock people, to show them that I wasn’t the silly girl they thought me to be, and New York had become this symbol of freedom. But then I got there, and I was still the same old me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being you,” he said without hesitation. He sounded kind of annoyed with her, like he had when she’d apologized on the plane.

People always said stuff like this to her, like the motivational memes posted on social media. It was easy to say such things when you were Johan, and people thought you handsome and daring no matter what you did. But he was trying to help, so she didn’t correct him or allow his ease with himself to bother her as it once had.