The Open Door - A Novel of Tea, Reform, and Protection - Paperback

Kiet Raksa has staked everything on a single idea: that people will pay more for tea when they can watch it stay honest the whole way down the hill. Every grower on his map has a name. Every payment clears in the open. In six weeks he means to stand up at the Yi Peng lantern festival and put his family's trade in a window where the whole world can read it. He calls it transparency. He calls it warmth. He does not call it a target.

Decha calls it a target.

Hired by the Raksa matriarch not to stop the launch but to survive it, Decha has spent twenty years turning other people's openness into a diagram of where they bleed. He has never met a man who drew his own weak points by hand and posted them for the convenience of anyone who might want to use them. He was brought in to build a perimeter around Kiet. He did not expect the perimeter to become the one place he wanted to stand.

When the threat closes in, the two men are shut into a single safe house - the careful, closed-off protector and the idealist who cannot stop leaving doors open. In borrowed rooms, over shared tea and long silences, something neither of them was taught how to give begins to change hands.

The Open Door is a slow-burn, low-heat, emotionally charged contemporary MM romance set against the tea rooms and lantern light of northern Thailand - a grumpy/sunshine, protector-and-protected love story about honesty, danger, and what it costs to let someone all the way in.