HER BILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

Chapter 11: I'm Still Thinking About Last Night

Some things were simply impossible to forget.

Ava had always been practical about romance — had watched enough of Jakarta's social marriages to understand that feelings were unreliable things, that attraction faded, that the carefully arranged unions her family preferred were at least built on something stable even if that something had nothing to do with love.

She had always believed that.

She was lying in bed on a Saturday morning at six forty-five, staring at the ceiling with a smile she couldn't turn off, and she was reconsidering everything.

It happened, she thought. It actually happened.

The restaurant. The pulled-out chair. The way he had said really beautiful like it was simply, factually true. The brownies. The ice cream. His thumb at the corner of her lips and then—

She pressed her face into her pillow.

The kiss.

Not a polite first-date kiss. Not tentative or performed or calibrated for the right impression. A real one — warm and unhurried and completely, devastatingly sincere, the kind that rearranged things inside you and left them in a slightly different order than before.

And then the forehead kiss at the door.

Good night, Ava.

She made a sound into her pillow that she would never admit to making.

Then she got up, because she was a functioning adult, and got ready for Saturday.

She decided on Cedar & Co. first — coffee, then Olivia's shop, a productive Saturday, completely normal — and told herself the decision had nothing to do with who would be behind the counter.

She was getting less convincing even to herself.

The morning was cold and bright, the kind of Saturday that Cedarville did particularly well — clean air and quiet streets and the particular stillness of a town that knew how to rest. Ava walked with her hands in her coat pockets and her breath making small clouds and felt, despite everything, like the world was arranged correctly.

She pushed open the door of Cedar & Co.

Thomas was behind the counter.

Of course he was.

He looked up the moment she walked in — she was starting to think he had some kind of radar specifically calibrated to her — and the smile that arrived on his face was different from his usual one. Smaller. More private. The smile of someone who knew something that the rest of the room didn't.

That smile.

The I know exactly where I was last night smile.

Ava felt warmth climb her neck and kept walking toward the counter with all the composure she could locate, which was not as much as she would have liked.

She opened her mouth to order.

He was already reaching for her cup.

"Don't," she said.

He looked up, amused. "Don't what?"

"Don't be smug about it."

"I'm not being smug," he said, writing her name on the cup with an expression that was absolutely, completely smug. "I'm just making your coffee."

"You're doing it smugly."

"That's just my face."

She bit her lip against a smile and looked very hard at the counter.

He finished making her drink and turned back to her, and when he held the cup out she reached for it and his fingers didn't move immediately — just a moment, just long enough for the back of his hand to brush against hers, warm and deliberate and completely, plausibly deniable.

Neither of them said anything.

She looked up. He was already looking at her — calm and warm and entirely certain, the way he always was — and for approximately three seconds the entire café ceased to exist.

Then she took the cup.

"Thank you," she said softly.

"Always," he said.

She turned and walked out into the Saturday morning and made it to the end of the block before she exhaled.

This man, she thought for what felt like the hundredth time.

This absolute, impossible man.

Olivia's shop was warm and slightly cluttered in the comfortable way of a place that was genuinely loved, and Ava arrived to find her boss rearranging a display of ceramic wall pieces with the focused energy of someone who had been thinking about it all week.

"Perfect timing," Olivia said, not looking up. "New shipment in the back. Inventory sheet is on the desk."

"Good morning to you too," Ava said, hanging up her coat.

Olivia glanced at her then — a quick, assessing look — and smiled to herself and said nothing, which somehow communicated everything.

Ava went to the back room and started on the inventory.

She was actually enjoying it — the quiet, the order of it, the satisfaction of counting and cataloguing — when she heard the door chime and voices spill into the shop. Bright, carrying voices. The kind that didn't particularly consider whether anyone else might be listening.

Amber.

Ava stayed where she was in the back corner, clipboard in hand, and kept counting.

"—absolutely gorgeous, I'm telling you," Amber was saying, to what sounded like two or three friends. "His family has holdings across three countries. Old money but he's also built his own portfolio—"

Ava counted ceramic figurines.

"—coming to the States this month. Not Cedarville obviously—" a small laugh that managed to make Cedarville sound like a punchline — "but Whitefish Lake. You know, the lake properties up north—"

Ava's hand stilled on a figurine.

"—Edward Lim," Amber said. "That's his name. My parents have been trying to arrange an introduction for months. I wasn't that interested honestly but then I saw his photos and—"

The figurine in Ava's hand was a small ceramic bird. She was holding it with considerably more force than a small ceramic bird required.

Edward Lim.

Whitefish Lake.

This month.

The noise of the shop continued around her — Amber's friends making the appropriate appreciative sounds, someone asking to see a photo, laughter — and Ava stood in the back corner of Olivia's shop and felt the Saturday morning she had been so carefully, happily constructing develop a very specific c***k.

Of course, she thought. Of course.

She set the ceramic bird down carefully.

She had known this was coming. She had always known — had filed it under later, not today with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been managing difficult realities her whole life. Edward Lim was not a surprise. His visit was not a surprise. The fact that Josephine had apparently been busy on multiple fronts simultaneously was not even remotely a surprise.

What she hadn't accounted for was hearing his name in a Cedarville boutique on a Saturday morning twelve hours after the best first date of her life.

Why, she thought, do some people have absolutely no sense of timing?

She picked up her clipboard and kept counting.

Amber found her eventually — or rather, moved through the shop in the particular way of someone who wanted to be seen finding things, and arrived at the display nearest Ava's corner with a bright, slightly sharpened smile.

"Oh, Ava! I didn't see you there."

I'm sure you didn't, Ava thought pleasantly.

"Amber," she said. "Find anything you like?"

"Always." Amber's eyes moved over her with the quick, assessing look Ava had learned to recognize — cataloguing, comparing, filing away. Then she moved on, back to her friends, back to the counter where Olivia was patiently wrapping purchases.

Ava heard her continue — slightly louder now, as if the audience had grown — "I mean, my parents think it's a good match. And honestly, someone like that — old family, real money — you can't really say no, can you? Some people would kill for that kind of introduction."

One of her friends murmured agreement.

Ava wrote a number on her clipboard.

Amber and her friends left in a cloud of perfume and conversation, the door chiming behind them. The shop went quiet.

Olivia appeared at the doorway to the back room.

"Well," she said. "She is certainly a presence."

"She is," Ava agreed neutrally.

"Interesting topic of conversation." Olivia leaned against the doorframe, her expression carefully casual in the way of someone who was paying close attention. "This Edward Lim. She seemed very invested for someone who claims not to care."

"Mm," Ava said, marking her clipboard.

"You know," Olivia said, "not everything that glitters is worth chasing. Old money, new money — none of it matters much if the person carrying it isn't worth knowing."

Ava looked up at her.

Olivia smiled — warm and simple and not requiring anything in return — and disappeared back to the front of the shop.

Ava stood in the back room for a moment.

Then she picked up her clipboard and finished the inventory.

She walked home in the early afternoon with the cold air on her face and her hands deep in her pockets and let herself think about it properly — the thing she had been carefully not thinking about since she heard his name.

Edward Lim. Whitefish Lake. This month.

Her mother, orchestrating quietly from a distance. Amber's parents, apparently also involved. A whole social machinery moving pieces toward an outcome that had been decided without her input, as outcomes in her world so often were.

She thought about Josephine's voice on the phone — you will always carry our family name, Hartono — and the weight of it, that particular gravity that had followed her all the way from Jakarta to Montana and apparently intended to keep following her.

Then she thought about last night.

The old car. The pulled-out chair. The brownies. Something that felt like a hug. His thumb at the corner of her lips and his eyes holding hers and the complete, uncomplicated reality of a man who wanted nothing from her except her company.

Edward Lim cannot top that, she thought.

The certainty of it surprised her — how immediate it was, how unqualified. Not I don't think he can or probably not but simply, flatly, with the authority of someone who knew both worlds and had made her choice:

He cannot.

She turned onto her street.

Cedar & Co. was visible from here — the warm light in the window, the handwritten specials board, the ordinary, extraordinary place where a man made her tea that felt like a hug and remembered her order without being asked and kissed her on the forehead at her door like she was something worth being careful with.

That, she thought, is what I came here for.

Not the Hartonos. Not Whitefish Lake. Not the perfectly arranged life waiting for her on the other side of the world.

This.

She unlocked her door, went inside, and made herself lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon being perfectly, quietly, stubbornly happy.

Edward Lim could wait.

Thomas had her coffee ready by seven forty-five every morning and that, for now, was everything.