HER BILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

Chapter 7: This Man Is Going To Ruin Me

Ava woke up on Tuesday morning feeling like herself.

Not Ava Hartono of the Jakarta Hartonos. Not the girl in the borrowed dress at the Whitefish estate. Not the face her mother wanted to position next to Edward Lim at the next family function.

Just Ava. Rested and quiet and already thinking about the afternoon.

She had a plan.

Free periods after lunch. Lesson planning to finish. Bookkeeping for Olivia's shop that she had been putting off for three days. She would bring her laptop to Cedar & Co., order something that wasn't coffee — leave a little mystery, she thought, and immediately felt ridiculous for thinking it — and sit by the window and be productive and normal and completely unbothered.

That was the plan.

She repeated it to herself while making her own coffee this morning — skipping her usual stop at the café deliberately, a decision she told herself was about routine and absolutely not about wanting Thomas to notice her absence.

The coffee she made at home was fine. It was perfectly adequate. It tasted like coffee the way a postcard tastes like a vacation — recognizable but missing something essential.

She drank it anyway and made breakfast — Greek yogurt with berries and granola, a slice of sourdough she had baked herself last Sunday, a sandwich packed for lunch. She moved around her small kitchen with the satisfied efficiency of someone who had learned to feed themselves properly and still found quiet pride in it.

Annita would approve, she thought, wrapping the sandwich in paper. Maybe not the sourdough. She would say it needed more salt.

She smiled to herself and packed her bag.

Tuesday morning at Blue Ridge Elementary School was its own particular kind of chaos — permission slips and lost pencil cases and two students who had apparently decided that Tuesday was an excellent day to renegotiate the entire classroom seating arrangement.

Ava handled all of it without breaking stride.

Her students noticed. Charlie — the quiet boy who had started raising his hand — looked up at her during morning reading and said, "Miss Hart, you seem happy today."

"Do I?" she said.

"You keep smiling at your desk," he said, with the devastating honesty of a ten year old.

"I'm just having a good week," she told him.

He looked unconvinced but returned to his book.

She arrived at Cedar & Co. at half past two with her laptop bag on her shoulder and her reusable tumbler in hand and told herself — firmly, finally, for the last time — that she was here to work.

The afternoon crowd was thinner than the morning rush. Softer light through the windows. Someone had put on a jazz playlist that drifted through the space like something unhurried and warm.

Thomas was behind the counter.

He looked up when she walked in and something in his expression shifted — quick and genuine, the way reactions are before people have time to arrange them.

"Hey," he said. "This is a surprise."

"I have free periods," she said, approaching the counter. "I thought I'd—"

"Work here?" He was already smiling. "Good. It's nice to end a shift seeing your face. Usually my morning is complete when you come in, but—" he tilted his head — "this is better."

Ava felt warmth spread from her chest outward and told it firmly to stop.

"I was in a hurry this morning," she said. "I didn't get to stop by."

"I noticed," he said simply.

He noticed.

She focused very hard on the menu board. "I think it's too late in the day for coffee. What else do you have?"

"What are you in the mood for?"

"Something that won't keep me up until two in the morning."

He considered this with the seriousness it apparently deserved. "I can do a fresh pressed fruit tea," he said. "Fruity, easy on the caffeine. I add chamomile — it's calming without putting you to sleep. Perfect for an afternoon that still has work in it."

Ava stared at him. "You just described exactly what I needed without me telling you."

He shrugged, but his eyes were warm. "You're not that hard to read, Ava."

She opened her mouth, closed it, and handed over her tumbler. "Fine. Yes. That please."

His smile followed her all the way to her table by the window.

She opened her laptop and actually worked.

This surprised her slightly — she had half expected to spend the afternoon staring into the middle distance thinking about brown eyes and tattoos — but the lesson plans were genuinely absorbing and the bookkeeping for Olivia's shop required enough focus to crowd everything else out.

The tea arrived and it was, as promised, exactly right. Fruity and warm with something soft underneath it — chamomile and something else she couldn't name, delicate and unhurried. She took a sip and made a small involuntary sound of appreciation.

At the next table, a woman smiled knowingly at her cup.

Ava worked through her planning, updated Olivia's inventory spreadsheet, drafted three emails she had been avoiding, and finished the last of her tea. The jazz playlist cycled through something slow and sweet. Outside the window Cedarville moved at its easy afternoon pace — a dog being walked, two elderly men talking outside the hardware store, a child on a bicycle with training wheels working very hard at a very slight incline.

She could live here forever, she thought. She genuinely could.

"All done?"

She looked up.

Thomas had appeared at her table — jacket on now, off the clock, sliding into the chair across from her with the ease of someone who had decided something and wasn't second-guessing it. He nodded at her laptop screen.

"For today," she said. "I still need to stop by Olivia's before she closes."

"I won't keep you long." He leaned back in the chair, completely relaxed, and looked at her. "I just wanted to check — you haven't forgotten about dinner."

"I haven't forgotten," she said.

"Good." A pause. "When?"

She bit her lip, thinking. Teaching, the shop, lesson prep, the mental energy required to simply maintain the life she had built here — her days were full in a way that was exhausting and wonderful in equal measure. "This week," she said. "I'll find an evening this week."

"No pressure," he said immediately, and she believed him. There was no agenda in it, no performance of patience designed to make her feel guilty. He just — meant it. "You're juggling a lot. I see that."

"It's a lot," she agreed. "But it's mine. I like it."

He looked at her for a moment with that quiet attention she was coming to recognize as distinctly Thomas — the kind of listening that went beyond the words. "Yeah," he said softly. "I get that."

She nodded at his jacket. "You're done for the day?"

"Just finished." He glanced around the café with an expression that was fond and a little proud and entirely unguarded. "I've been reworking the menu actually. Adding things. The afternoon tea is new — I put it on last week."

"It's incredible," Ava said, and meant it completely. "You should have led with that."

He laughed — genuine and easy. "I'm also working on a seasonal drink for winter. Something warm, a little spiced. Haven't figured out the exact combination yet."

"Tell me what you have so far."

And he did.

He talked about flavor combinations and customer preferences and the particular challenge of creating something that felt special without being inaccessible, and Ava watched his face as he talked — the way his eyes lit up, the animation in his hands when he described something he was excited about, the complete absence of performance or pretense. He wasn't trying to impress her. He was just — sharing something he loved with someone he wanted to share it with.

A simple man, she thought. With a big, quietly extraordinary interior.

This man, said a voice somewhere in the back of her mind, is going to ruin me completely.

She ignored the voice. She was getting good at that.

"I love that you care about it that much," she said when he paused. "Most people would just — put drinks on a menu. You think about the experience."

Something in his expression softened. "My grandmother owned a diner," he said. "Small place, nothing fancy. But she knew every regular's order, every preference, every hard day and good day. She used to say—" he paused, and the pause felt careful, like he was handling something precious — "she used to say that feeding people well is a form of love. You just have to mean it."

Ava was quiet for a moment.

"She sounds wonderful," she said softly.

"She was," Thomas said. Just that. Nothing more needed.

They sat for a moment in the kind of comfortable silence that doesn't happen between people who don't know each other — the kind that requires trust to exist at all. Outside, the afternoon light had shifted to something golden and long. Ava looked at the time on her laptop and felt the particular sadness of a moment ending before you're ready.

"I have to go," she said. "Olivia closes at seven."

"Go," he said, straightening up. "I'll be here tomorrow morning."

"I know," she said, closing her laptop and sliding it into her bag.

She stood, gathered her things, and was pulling on her coat when he said — casually, warmly, like it was the easiest thing in the world:

"Whenever you're ready, Ava. A casual dinner. Nothing fancy. Just — good food and more of this."

She looked at him.

More of this.

More easy conversation and genuine laughter and a man who talked about his grandmother's diner like it was sacred and remembered her order without being asked and looked at her — always, consistently, warmly — like she was just a person worth knowing.

Not a Hartono. Not an heiress. Not a strategic alliance or a family obligation or a face that needed to appear at the right events.

Just — worth knowing.

"Soon," she promised.

She walked out into the Cedarville evening and all the way to Olivia's shop she thought about his grandmother's diner and the way he had said she was — just that, nothing more — and the particular, terrible, wonderful feeling of a person getting slowly, irreversibly under your skin.

This man, she thought again as she pushed open Olivia's door.

I am in so much trouble.