Legally Addicted - By Lena Dowling Page 0,1

Brad’s breathing deepened. He had drifted back to sleep.

She walked away from the bed and stepped up to an enormous gilt mirror. After rifling through her purse to find a comb, she did a reasonable job of un-matting the impressive beehive of bed-hair she had going on. Satisfied that her hair was as good as it was ever going to get, she applied some lipstick. Then, closing her purse, she took one last glance in the direction of the gorgeous guy sleeping in his oversized, Louis-the-whatever-style bed, and let herself out of the penthouse apartment.

Once she was in the hotel lift, Georgia pushed the button for the ground floor and slumped against the rail, leaning her forehead into her hands.

But not because she felt guilty about it.

She had never gotten the shame thing some women felt after a one-night stand. If it felt good and she had kept herself safe, where was the harm? No, she was leaning on the wall of the lift for support because of what she had seen in Brad Spencer’s apartment.

What she had seen confirmed the rumours that practising law was only a sideline for Brad, and that he had indeed inherited the Spencer property portfolio that comprised a serious chunk of the city’s prime real estate.

A regular divorce lawyer, even one as high profile as Brad Spencer, who acted for celebrities and Sydney’s old money families, couldn’t possibly afford a sprawling, mansion style penthouse in the centre of Sydney’s CBD. That couldn’t be achieved on any kind of salary. For that, there had to be dollar symbols lurking somewhere in his DNA sequencing. Georgia never did the rich type. She kept most men, most people for that matter, at arms-length, but any man who had their life handed to them on a hallmarked platter stood a less than zero chance of breaching her inner circle of trust.

Inside the apartment, the decoration, rich and elegant by evening, had come across as seriously over the top in harsher morning light. The fact that the antiques and chandeliers were obviously the genuine article was about the only thing saving the place from looking gaudy in the extreme. Not that better interior decoration sense would have saved him. As far as Georgia was concerned, wealth that came courtesy of an inheritance was something to be avoided at all costs.

Georgia indulged in a wry smile.

At least it had been satisfying to confirm what she believed already; that money might purchase most things, but affluence couldn’t buy taste, or the satisfaction that came from having made it on your own.

Buoyed up by that thought of self-vindication, Georgia stood up, straightened her suit jacket, and waited for the automatic doors to open.

After exiting the lift and stepping out of the hotel on to the street, Georgia looked at her watch. There had been no time to change into evening wear before the previous night’s function, so thankfully she wouldn’t be doing a walk of shame. Nevertheless, she couldn’t wear the same clothes to the office two days running. Nor did she have time to make the train trip out to her own apartment in the suburbs and back before work.

There was nothing else for it; she was going to have to buy a new suit.

‘You know, I had an odd thing happen to me this morning.’

Brad looked up from his copy of the Sydney Morning Herald to speak to the butler, who was pouring his coffee. He suspected Jeffrey ironed the newspaper before he received it each morning, an old butlers’ trick to prevent ink transfer to the reader’s hands, but he had never asked or he would have been compelled to put a stop to it, and that would have been awkward. Jeffrey was pushing retirement age and wasn’t keen on change.

He had tried it once, organising for an interior designer to refurbish the penthouse, but after encountering Jeffrey, the designer had refused to return. Brad had been forced to put the designer to work on his beach house instead. It was only with great reluctance, in the face of a threatened lawsuit for breach of contract, that he had allowed the family holiday home to be updated. Until then he had kept the beach house as an untouched shrine to the few happy family times he had known there as a kid.

‘Oh yes, what happened, sir?’

Calling him ‘sir’ was just another one of the many antiquated habits he had been unable to get the older man to break. He