Bittersweet Expectations (Hate at First Flight #0.5)

8. Falling Under the Spell

I stared at the list in my hand and wondered how in God's beautiful Earth did the lunatic I would be now calling my boss expected me to finish all of this by five in the afternoon.

• Drain and clear the pool.
• Dust the entire house.
• Reorganize the library.
• Clean the china and polish the silverware.
• Press all the shirts.
• Polish shoes.
• Trim the garden.
• Mop the house.
• Do the laundry.
• Take suits to the drycleaners.

Did he think I was supermaid or something?

"Is something wrong?" Ethan Clarke asks as he watches me from his designer chair riffling through the New York Times.

I tear my eyes off the list of death and stare at him back, ready to tell him how obscene and mental he must be to expect me to finish this all by five in the afternoon. And not to add the fact that if I did somehow miraculously manage to do so, I still needed to rush to attend to hotline by six when my shift started.

But what met my eyes stopped me from evening bubbling out any sort of complain.

Ethan Clarke had a smirk on his face, and not just any smirk. It was the mother of all smirks. The type you wear when you knew you were one move away from checkmating someone or the one you had on when you knew something someone didn't.

But in this instant, Ethan Clarke wore that smirk because he knew that I couldn't possibly accomplish this by five in the afternoon. Not unless I worked tirelessly with no intention of resting at all or having lunch.

And if I didn't complete the tasks, he had something over me, to tell his mother and work towards getting me fired.

Driven by the need to prove him wrong and the desire not to walk right into his trap, I shake my head and find myself saying, "No. Nothing's wrong at all. Where should I start?"

•••

If there is even something such as reincarnation, I hoped that I wouldn't be meeting Ethan Clarke in my next one. Or if I had the unfortunate likelihood of meeting him, I hoped he was the one working under me and I was making him doing the obscene task of reorganizing my library.

Don't get me wrong. I love books and reading and everything. But when you're told to reorganize a library filled with well over two thousand books, you tend to realize that there is something to having an electronic library over an actual one.

One upside though to the hardship though was finding some treasures. Just like the library in the main building, Building X's library was well-stocked and I found some books that were my favourites.

Who knew Ethan Clarke liked to read?

He didn't seem like the type. But then again, maybe there is something to not making assumptions about someone's interest.

So far I'd managed to dust and mop the entire house and the sound of the washing machine spinning in the background at least provided some sort of noise to this otherwise quiet as a cemetery house.

He was still in the house. The last time I'd seen him was twenty minutes ago when I saw him in the kitchen. Other than that he'd been keeping well out of my line of sight as I went about my task.

Once I reorganized the entire library, which was not an easy feat, I started cleaning up again because I'd basically dismantled everything to put then back together.