Page 33 of Princess Bride Swap

“Have you?”

“Yes. And while the writing is quite skilled and the characters interesting enough, it seems to me the whole thing could be solved twenty pages in if they just sat down and had a mature conversation.”

“Perhaps, but how often are we as mature as we’d like to be? How often do humans go through great lengths to avoid difficult conversations? How interesting would it be if every fictional character acted perfectly reasonably and maturely—especially considering we as a species rarely do.”

It felt pointed, even though when he turned to face her again she wasn’t looking at him. So he kept walking on, until they reached the destination of this trail he’d made. A perfect opening to look out over the chalet below and everything they’d just climbed. The beautiful, ancient mountains all around them. And the perfect weather for everything to sparkle with seeming magic.

Her face broke out into one of those beautiful smiles, just pure, simplistic joy at a beautiful landscape. Her eyes were almost perfectly green up here in all this sky and white, her cheeks and nose flushed.

“How often do you make it up here?” She was looking at the chalet, so he assumed she meant this place in general, not the hike.

“Not often. It’s hard to get away. Especially with how things are with parliament. They’ll take any excuse to paint me the same as my uncles and cousins.”

“That must be a difficult legacy to live down.”

He frowned a little. “Duties aren’t meant to beeasy.” When he’d been young, and still childish enough to complain about what his grandmother expected of him, he’d always been lectured on his privilege. On the special space he held and how he owed it to the men he’d never met to reclaim their legacy. “Myexistenceis a payment of a debt, and so I will pay it.”

Beau looked at him, her forehead furrowed, her expression one of confusion. “Why should your existence be a payment of adebt?”

“My grandmother would have been an excellent ruler, but she was not allowed. I believe my mother would have been as well, should it have been expected of her.”

But the look of confusion never left her face. “So? What has that got to do with you?”

“I am finally the male heir Divio deserved. It should have been my grandmother. So I pay the debt lost.”

Still, she looked at him as though he were speaking in Italian instead of English. “None of you can control what sex you were born as. That...makes no sense. It was just... The way things happened. Like Zia being good with crowds when we were young. It’s just...the way we are.”

Lyon resisted the urge to rub at his chest where an odd tension banded. “I am not explaining it well then. I simply meant that I always knew this would be my responsibility, and that I would meet all challenges.”

“That doesn’t make the challenges less difficult, Lyon. A duty can still be...a weight. A struggle. Even if you do it with a glad heart.”

No one had ever put it that way. It was strangely...satisfying for someone to acknowledge nothing he did waseasy. That it wasworkto be everything his grandmother had wanted him to be.

She would have given him that assurance, he believed, if she’d lived long enough to see him crowned. Then he finally would have garnered her approval. He was sure of it.

“I suppose,” he agreed, wanting to get away from this uncomfortable topic. The way his short breathing wasn’t from hiking, but from that weight in his chest.

“Well, I quite like it up here,” Beau said brightly, as if she sensed his need to move on. “Hopefully once we convince parliament of your stability, we can come up here more often.”

He could not account for how much he liked the way she saidwe, as though they were a team. A partnership. He had not thought of it quite like that. She was an...aid to something. A tool. He had never expected toshareresponsibility with anyone. The responsibility was his.

You are the only hope of Divio, Lyon. All rests on you.

Him and him alone. But now he had a wife. A partner and no doubt Beau could handle her own weight, and that was...amazing, really.

“You will have to make that drive you hated more often to come up here.” He even managed to smile as he teased her.

She wrinkled her nose. “Thatisa great shame.”

“You have no fear of any of these ledges,” he pointed out, as she got closer than he liked to the edge of an overlook. The view was beautiful, but the results of one wrong move catastrophic.

“I trust my own two feet. I do not trust big burly machines to navigate narrow roads.”

He smiled in spite of himself, she was such a funny little thing. “Do you have any other peculiar fears?”

“I don’t consider it peculiar at all,” she replied, all haughty offense.

It was wrong, surely, how much that tone, thatlookaffected him. How immediately it sent a thrill to his sex. A desire that threatened to obscure all those rules he’d set for himself this morning.

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