Loving The Billionaire’s Cold Heart

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Ethan's POV

The restaurant Marcus had described was on a narrow street I had driven past a hundred times without seeing.

Small door, no signage beyond a number, twelve tables inside, lighting that was genuinely terrible and made everything feel like a secret. The kind of place that existed entirely on the strength of its food and the loyalty of people who had found it and kept it to themselves.

Nora walked in and the tension she carried in public spaces, that slight bracing, the invisible armour — simply wasn't there. She knew this room. She was comfortable in it in the specific way that means a place has fed something in you at some point and the memory of that lives in your body.

We were seated in the corner. She looked at the menu for forty seconds and set it down and I knew she already knew what she wanted and had known before we arrived.

"Order what you actually want," I said.

"I was going to."

"Not the second thing. The first thing."

She looked at me. "How do you know I was going to order the second thing?"

"Because you do that. In restaurants where you're uncertain of the context you order the thing that seems appropriate rather than the thing you want." I held her gaze. "This place has no context to be uncertain of. Order the first thing."

She was quiet for a moment. Something moved in her expression — not quite a surprise. More like being seen in a specific way she hadn't prepared for.

"The lamb," she said. "And the bread. And the pasta as a starter even though that's excessive."

"Perfect."

"You're not going to say that's too much?"

"Why would I?"

"People usually —" She stopped herself. Smiled slightly. "Right."

I reached across and turned her hand over on the table. Just rested my fingers against her palm. Not making anything of it. Just there.

"Marcus told me you used to come here with your mother," I said.

She looked up. "When?"

"When you left. He texted me the address and two lines of context." I paused. "Before she got sick. Saturday afternoons. You'd save for two weeks to come once a month."

She was quiet for a moment. Looking at our hands on the table.

"He shouldn't have told you that," she said. But her voice didn't mean it.

"He wanted me to understand what I was bringing you back to." I looked at her. "Do you mind?"

"No." Soft. "I mind that I'm slightly emotional about it and we've only been here four minutes."

"We can be here as long as you want."

She looked up and her expression was entirely open — no fold, no management. Just Nora, in a room that meant something to her, letting it mean something.

"Thank you for finding it," she said.

"Marcus found it."

"You followed the instructions."

"I'll always follow the instructions when the instructions are about you."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she turned her hand under mine and held on.

We ate slowly. The food was as good as advertised and neither of us was in a hurry and the conversation moved the way it did now — easy, ranging, no weight.

She told me about the first time her mother had brought her here. Fourteen, the height of a particularly difficult period with money, and her mother had saved quietly for three months and brought her here for her birthday and ordered everything without looking at the prices and they had stayed for two hours.

"She never told me she'd saved for it until years later," Nora said. "At the time she just made it seem like we came here all the time."

"She protected the magic of it."

"Yes." She looked at the table. "I do the same thing. I don't tell people the cost of things. I just present the thing."

"I've noticed."

She glanced up. "What have you noticed?"

"That you make things look effortless when they aren't. The hospital visits, the legal work, handling Helena, and Camille. You do all of it and you present it clean and you never show the weight." I held her gaze. "I notice the weight."

She was very still.

"How?" she said.

"Your hands. When something is costing you your hands go flat on whatever surface is nearest. Counter, table, your own knees. Like you're grounding yourself." I paused. "You did it in the café with Helena. Both hands flat on the table. You did it in the kitchen the night I told you about Wolfe."

She looked at her hands. Then back at me.

"Nobody has ever told me that," she said.

"Nobody was paying close enough attention."

The table between us felt very small. She was looking at me with that expression, the completely unguarded one, and I felt it the way I always felt it, like something that had found a frequency specific to her.

"Ethan." My name in her mouth at that register.

"Yes."

"I need to tell you something."

"Tell me."

"I was so certain this was something I had to survive. That the best outcome was getting through it intact and leaving with the damage contained." She held my gaze. "I built the whole architecture of how I was going to manage this — distance, compliance, quiet, invisible. I had it completely planned."

"I know."

"You dismantled it without trying."

"So did you," I said. "I had a framework too. Cold, functional, separate. I had decided what this was and how it would work and how I would feel about it." I paused. "You walked into my kitchen at five thirty in the morning and I felt the framework go and I spent three weeks pretending I hadn't."

She laughed. Quietly. The real one.

"The butter," she said.

"The butter."

She shook her head and looked at the table and then back at me and in her eyes was something I recognised now without needing to name it because it was the same thing I had been carrying since a kitchen morning and a laptop turned toward me without hesitation.

"I love you," she said. Simply. Like it had been true for a while and she was done waiting for the right moment.

The restaurant was quiet around us.

"I know," I said. "I love you too."

She exhaled like she had been holding that breath for a long time.

I reached across the table and tucked her hair back from her face, that gesture, the one that had started as instinct and became intention, and she leaned into it slightly, barely, just enough.

"Can we come back here?" she said.

"Every week."

"Marcus will want to come."

"Marcus can come."

She smiled. Full and real. It felt like a physical thing.