Accidentally in Love, page 12
This was not the kind of reasoning she would have expected to hear coming from her sister, and for that reason thought it over carefully before answering her.
“That’s true – but I’m not his family.”
“No, but you are a good person and you can make a difference. It’s clear he’s come here to try to shake you up a bit, so don’t give in to the first provocation. Because he looks like that’s exactly what he’s expecting. And actually, if I have to be honest – your place has never looked so clean!”
And so saying she walked towards the front door.
*
Ethan joined Sara in the kitchen a few minutes later. He was wearing black jeans and a a rather tight t-shirt of the same color. Fancy, she thought it was only women that wanted to show off, as she watched the way the t-shirt clung to his muscles. But she wasn’t that surprised he had enough time to go to the gym. After all, he had absolutely nothing else to do all day.
“My sister just pointed something out to me,” she told him, looking around her at the kitchen shelves. They were as clean as a whistle – so clean, in fact, that you could have eaten off them. “Did you have my house cleaned?”
He smiled. “What kind of housewife are you if you need your sister to point that out to you! Yes, I had the whole house disinfected, as a precaution.”
“What do you mean?” she asked dubiously.
“Well, this is a pretty rough part of town, who knows what kind of diseases there are flying around…” He looked a bit uncomfortable. For once he even seemed serious.
“Look, why don’t you go just back to your safe, disinfected Manhattan?” she suggested, feeling offended.
“I’m putting my antibodies to the test. But just so as not to take too much of a risk, I thought it was a good idea to disinfect everything. Absolutely everything…”
“I hope you don’t mean you’ve been in my room as well!” Sara exclaimed, feeling agitated at the very idea.
He looked at her with a depressed expression on his face. “My god, you call that your room ? Your pigsty would be more like it!”
She shrugged defensively. “Look, not everyone has your obsessions. Me and my mess get on quite well together, thank you very much!”
“Well, they disinfected all that too, by the way. Even though ‘your mess’ made life pretty tricky for the cleaning company,” he said, in a voice as resentful as if he’d cleaned the room himself.
“What! They better not have touched my stuff!” She sprang up from her chair with the intention of going to check out the extent of the damage for herself.
“All they did was tidy it up a bit,” said Ethan, blocking her way. He couldn’t understand what she was getting so antsy about.
“But I can never find anything when it’s all tidy!” she muttered as she pushed him out of the way. And couldn’t help noticing the steely muscles she brushed against as she did so.
She returned to the kitchen a few minutes later. “Everything’s been tidied up all right…” she sighed.
“Of course it’s been tidied up! Just the way it should have been a long time ago. You ought to thank me for that. Anyway, listen, let’s stop with all this pointless fighting – what’s for dinner?”
“What do you mean, what’s for dinner?”
“Dining, eating, whatever you call it – I suppose you do it too. So what are you going to cook?” he asked hopefully.
“Me? Nothing. In the evening I usually just have a salad.”
“And you don’t cook?” he asked, looking alarmed.
“To be honest, no. I can barely manage an egg. ”
“But doesn’t your family have a restaurant? Aren’t you Italian?” he inquired as if she were a Martian.
Sara was beginning to feel the end of her tether approaching. “Listen, how come you know what my family does?” she asked angrily. “Don’t tell me that you’ve been spying on me!” But she wasn’t really that surprised. The more time passed, the more she realized that her initial feeling about him had been right. Ethan Phelps was neither stupid nor ingenuous. He’d been doing his homework, too. “My family might have a restaurant and I might be of Italian origin, but that doesn’t mean that I have to know how to cook! Enough with all this stereotyping, I’m sick of it. If you really want to know, I used to wash the dishes and serve at the tables when I was a kid. I never once set foot in the kitchen. I never even picked up a wooden spoon…” And after all that time she had no intention of doing so and making a fool of herself in front of Tony. She preferred to watch him from afar, without prying eyes witnessing her embarrassment.
“So what do you live off, thin air?” asked Ethan, looking her up and down from head to toe. “I mean, you’re slim, but you’re not that slim…”
Sara glared at him. “Okay, I admit that from time to time I might drop in at the restaurant just to pick up something to bring home to eat,” she said, folding her arms in readiness for war. In just one day, Ethan had managed to commit two of the most serious mistakes in the world: he’d had her room tidied and he had criticized her figure. If he carried on like this, he definitely risked coming to a nasty end.
“Great idea! Let’s go!” he exclaimed triumphantly.
“But the restaurant is closed today…” said Sara.
Ethan slumped, demoralized, into the chair, his enthusiasm gone. “You’re a horrible person… For a moment I hoped.”
“Oh, you poor little boy,” she taunted him.
“Well, since we have no other choice…” He pulled his phone out from the back pocket of his pants and dialled a number. “Chris, we need a takeaway, please. Sorry, but it’s a bit desolate round here, and I don’t trust the kind of food that we might end up eating. What shall we have?” he said, looking at Sara. She shrugged as if to say ‘Whatever’.
“Ok, you decide. You know what I like. The young lady here won’t give us any problems. Am I still at her house? Oh yeah…” he laughed and hung up.
A serious expression on her face, Sara stared at him. “See? Even your humble servant thinks that I should throw you out.”
Ethan rubbed his jaw. “But you are in no position to do that,” he noted with satisfaction, “because you don’t even have the keys to the front door. ”
Sara realized he was right. “Exactly, well done. So where are my keys?” she asked, holding out her hand.
Ethan extracted a giant ultramodern key from his back pocket and placed it in Sara’s palm theatrically. “Et voilà, madame.”
“I’m so grateful to you for allowing me to come into my own house,” she said sarcastically, looking up and meeting those spectacular eyes of his. “Look, now that your little joke is over and has worked, what do you say that you clear out?”
He didn’t bat an eyelid. “There’s one thing you should know about me, which is that even in my madness, I tend to be quite determined. I don’t easily give up when I really believe in something. The problem is that I don’t usually care about anything…”
“And getting rid of me by driving me crazy just happens to be one of the few things that you consider worth caring about?” she asked him incredulously.
Ethan looked at her and smiled, almost benevolently. “As I told you before, it’s not about you. It’s your role in all of this. You’re really nice, actually, which is something that I hadn’t expected, but I can’t allow myself any distractions. My goal is to get my family and all their interfering off my back. And if you want my friendly advice, you will get out of this situation as soon as possible to avoid getting caught up in the crossfire. Because I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, really.” He seemed sincere, as far as that was at all possible.
Sara didn’t lower her eyes nor waver in the face of these implicit threats. “Instead of doing that, why don’t you let me become your friend and actually help you?”
He looked at her incredulously. “Oh, God, you’re even worse than all the other lawyers before you! You’re actually pretending to care . Sara, don’t waste your time and energy with people like me. It’s not worth it,” he advised her as if he had nothing to do with it.
“You know, you’re not the first person to say something like that to me,” she admitted, remembering Rebecca’s words. But it was far more difficult to seem detached and diffident when you were personally involved in something. Ethan wasn’t just a job, he was also a human being, and Sara couldn’t overcome her urge to want to try and help him. Turning her head to look the other way just wasn’t part of her nature.
“So listen to those wise people who warned you, then,” he repeated seriously. “I’m not worth it. ”
“We’ll see,” she said finally. She had some important things to do before the food arrived. For example, mess up her room.
*
Ethan’s driver brought them Indian food. If it had been up to her, Sara would never have opted for Indian cuisine. Never. The takeaway might have come from a renowned local restaurant, but for Sara’s tastes it was still way too hot – so hot that she couldn’t pick out any of the flavours once her tongue came into contact with all the chilli.
“This is awful,” she complained, biting quickly into the naan that accompanied the meat. When even the bread didn’t manage to reduce the heat of the spices, she gulped down a litre of water, hoping vainly it would extinguish some of the fire that was burning her throat. “What on earth is this stuff?”
Ethan chuckled with amusement as he watched Sara burning up. “Lamb in a spicy sauce.”
She looked disgusted. “In future, please bear in mind that I can’t stand spicy food.”
He took another package out from the bag on the table. “Beef curry?” he suggested.
“I hate curry,” muttered Sara.
“And I hate living in small apartments, but as you can see, I adapt. Try this curry, it’s the best in the whole city.” He opened the box and held it out to her.
Sara was about to pick out a piece of meat with her fork when Ethan quickly snatched the box away. “Not with your fork! Get a clean spoon!” he said, shocked at her thoughtlessness .
“Look, I haven’t got cholera, you know…” she laughed.
“Maybe not, but you are in any case a carrier of microbes.”
Sara got up from the kitchen table, took a spoon from the drawer and helped herself to some of the meat. “I really don’t understand you,” she suddenly blurted out. “I mean, for example, when you meet some new girl you want to spend the evening with, how do you manage to kiss her? What do you do, demand to see her last blood test?” But as soon as she’d spoken, she regretted it. It was none of her business.
Ethan raised his head curiously from his plate and looked at her. “Kissing someone I’ve just met ?” he asked, without hiding his horror.
“Bad question, sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Are you one of those women who likes being kissed?” Ethan asked, while carefully examining her face which, in the meantime, had turned rather red in color.
“Everyone likes being kissed…” she replied, feeling slightly defensive.
But Ethan cut her off. “Not everyone, actually – I hate being kissed. I hardly ever kiss anyone. And women prefer being kissed much more than men, that’s a fact. ”
“Yeah, you men concentrate on something else ,” she said sarcastically. But then she thought about what he was saying. “What do you mean you hardly ever kiss anyone? You never kiss? At all?”
“Kisses contain… a bit too much saliva for my liking,” he replied after giving the question some thought.
“No kissing but everything else is ok?” teased Sara. “Who are you, Julia Roberts?”
“Who?” he asked, not getting her joke.
“Julia Roberts! In Pretty Woman ! Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Pretty Woman !” Sara cried, staring at him in astonishment. In her modest opinion, everyone should see Pretty Woman – it was one of the classics.
“Of course I haven’t – it’s a chick film.”
“It’s not a chick film, it’s a classic! No – you can’t continue living in ignorance.”
“I’m fine as I am,” said Ethan defensively, perhaps sensing the danger in the air.
But Sara wasn’t going to let it go like that. “Oh no – if you insist on staying here, let me tell you that we will be having chick film marathons . And we can start right away with Pretty Woman ,” she announced, pleased with her brilliant idea. She would come out victorious either way. Either Ethan would give up and flee her house thinking that she was a madwoman or he could spend two hours watching one of the cheesiest films ever made in the history of the cinema. And watching him suffer would be rather amusing.
The flicker of a challenge appeared in Ethan’s eyes. “Well done, really. Very clever. But I’m not giving in, and if you keep insisting on this nonsense, be warned that you’ll be paid back with the same coin. Have you ever seen Rambo ?”
Sara glared at him. “Of course not,” she answered, almost outraged, “it’s Rambo !”
Looking very satisfied with himself, Ethan smiled. “Oh no – Rambo is a classic!” he exclaimed.
“No, it’s not, it’s a ridiculous piece of trash where everyone is trying to kill everyone else.”
“What?! Come on , it’s a masterpiece!”
“No, it’s not!”
After ten minutes of pointless bickering, Sara raised her hand.
“Stop! I have a proposal!” Ethan looked at her curiously. “If you agree to watch Pretty Woman ,” she suggested, “I’ll sit through Rambo . That’s a fair deal.” Just how terrible could Rambo be? It was only a stupid film…
“What kind of lawyer are you,” he said, laughing. “I might actually consider it, but first I’d need a beer to help me reflect on your proposal.”
“No beers, sorry.”
“I’m fine with wine too,” he added .
Sara stared at him in all innocence. “And no wine…”
Ethan sat up straight in his chair. “Are you kidding me? Okay – anything containing alcohol is ok,” he said, sounding slightly desperate. “Anything at all…”
Damn Richter for having trapped her into taking this case which was well beyond her capabilities. Sara looked at him, trying to appear confident. She was well aware that they’d finally arrived at the most important part of the evening.
“No – no alcohol in this house,” she said seriously. “None at all. And if you want to stay here, you will just have to abide by my rules. You don’t drink in this house.”
He stared at her, hardly believing his ears. “You know, don’t you, that I have a bit of a problem with alcohol? I mean, they must have told you about it…”
Already bored with the topic, Sara folded her arms. “That’s not my problem. My house, my rules. Of course, you can always decide to walk out of that door, choose to live somewhere else, and get drunk all the time like you usually do. Or you can stay here without any booze.”
There was a long silence. He got up from his chair and approached her threateningly. “You’re playing with fire… ”
Sara continued to stay where she was, playing it cool. “For all you know, I could be an arsonist,” she replied.
At that, Ethan, who was trying with all his might to keep up the hard man act, burst out laughing. Sara was funny. In her own way, of course, but still, she had spirit. And it took a lot for him to admit that, because Ethan usually made a big deal about finding everyone boring. He often even found himself boring.
“Okay, my little arsonist,” he consented after reflecting for a moment, “we’ll do it your way for the moment. No drinking in this house.”
“And I don’t want you stinking of booze when you walk through the door of this house,” she added.
“What? Now I can’t even have a drink when I’m out?” he asked dryly.
“I didn’t say that, I’m just making you aware that you have to dispose of whatever it is you’ve been drinking before you set foot in here. People who drink smell of booze, and it makes me feel sick. Remember,” she said, smiling at him, “my house, my rules.”
“What are you, some paladin of righteousness who’s fighting the evils that beset humanity?”
“This coming from the man who won’t kiss anybody because he’s afraid of germs…” she replied with a chuckle .
He reflected for a moment. “Okay, no drinking here and no coming home stinking of booze. Anything else?”
Sara thought about it for a moment, but she was too satisfied at having won this little battle to think of anything else. “Nope, I don’t think so.”
“Great,” said Ethan. And right there, in Sara’s kitchen, he whipped off his shirt in a single move and stood there half naked.
“Are you practising to be a stripper in your free time?” asked Sara, trying to look relaxed as she struggled to stop herself from blushing. There was nothing she could do about it – naked, or even half naked, men made her feel uncomfortable. The example she currently had standing in front of her even more than others.
He moved closer towards her. “I’m just making myself comfortable ,” he said cunningly. “After all, you said there were no more rules… No drinking, remember? It means I can carry on as I usually do at home.”
Sara covered her eyes, which were now full of terror. “You go around in the nude?” she asked in a trembling voice.
He smiled at her as if he were a cat ready to eat a mouse. “Oh yes! But I’ll go easy on you today – I’ll only take off my t-shirt. And tomorrow… well, who knows? We’ll have to see. Good night, my dear.”
And so saying he disappeared into his bedroom.
Chapter 7
Two days later, Rebecca arrived at work to find Sara in her office, buried in piles of paperwork that completely covered her desk. She was dangerously close to tears. Rebecca knocked on the open door to make her presence known and, not getting an answer, decided to go in anyway.
“Sara, what the hell’s the matter?” she asked with obvious concern.
Sara looked up from the papers. “Believe me, you’d be better off not knowing what Ethan has done now…” she replied, sounding depressed.
