Authors: Lena Dowling
Legally Addicted
Legally Addicted
Lena Dowling
A fast-moving, high stakes battle-of-the-sexes story with a Hepburn/Tracey flavor (and a hot one-night stand!).
Georgia Murray’s one-night-stand with fellow Sydney lawyer and billionaire property magnate Brad Spencer was supposed to be just that – one-off, fun. Case closed.
But Brad knows something Georgia doesn’t: their lives are about to become entwined in an unavoidable way. The tension smoulders towards ignition point, and Georgia is terrified to find herself contemplating more from Brad, even the possibility of love – a concept with the power to frighten her more than anything else in this world.
In her previous lives, Lena Dowling has been a lawyer, policy analyst, and an administration manager. While Lena was born and raised in New Zealand, it was during a stint working ‘across the ditch’ in Australia that she took up writing in earnest. Having found her inspiration in The Lucky Country, Lena writes Australasian themed romances about gutsy, intelligent heroines, and the men who dare to love them. Lena currently lives in beautiful subtropical Northland, New Zealand, with her own computer-code-writing hero.
With thanks to my fellow members of Romance Writers of New Zealand, whose virtual ‘water cooler conversations’ via email provide daily doses of humour, wisdom, and inspiration.
For my sister — a smart, feisty, and courageous Sydney lawyer
Also Available From Escape Publishing…
For thirty blissful sleepy seconds after waking up to the familiar sound of Sydney’s early morning traffic, Georgia Murray believed she was in her own bed. She might have gone on believing it if something hadn’t stirred beside her, which given she lived alone was, at best, disconcerting. She opened one eye. The antique furniture, chandeliers, and gilt mirror immediately sealed her suspicions. This was not her own pared down, ultra-modern apartment.
Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Now fully alert, her mind began to download a series of memories from the night before; mildly disturbing memories, involving too much wine, an űber-handsome and charming colleague, and being good in a bad way, or was that bad in a good way?
Either way it had been hot.
The images playing through her mind confirmed that she had said things, done things, and requested other things, and Brad Spencer, the man now sleeping next to her, had obliged.
OMG, how he had obliged.
She blushed, pulling the sheet up under her chin, setting off ripples of pure pleasure as the fabric slid between her thighs. Her leg touched his and the warmth of his skin seeped in, tempting her to tap him awake and suggest an encore. Her hand hovered over his shoulder, undecided.
Then she came to her senses.
She looked at him, his dishevelled hair and stubbled chin doing nothing to detract from his perfect jawline and athletic body. He was even more beautiful up close than across a courtroom. He was certainly much better looking lying naked next to her than wearing one of his trademark European designer suits.
Georgia sat up and gave her spine a rolling stretch, arching like a cat. This could only ever be a one-night deal, and she would preserve her pride, making sure she left before he woke up.
She moved her leg away from him, a little at a time, until their skin no longer touched. He stirred, but didn’t wake, as she inched across the bed. The bed was a super-king size, and it took an age before she could finally extricate herself and begin putting on her clothes. Like crumbs in a Hansel and Gretel trail, she found her bra trailing off the end of the bed, pointing the way back into the lounge room. Her skirt hung askew over a French antique chair, and below it were her shoes, beside which she also discovered her blouse and purse.
Everything, except her underwear.
Damn it.
Her G-string was still in the bed.
She considered abandoning the item, but after weighing up the risk of having to face an awkward goodbye versus the humiliation of leaving Brad with a souvenir, she decided to risk retrieving it.
Tiptoeing back across the lounge into his bedroom, she crouched down at the side of the bed. She inserted her hand into the sheets, sliding it down, until her fingertips made contact with lace. She had barely grasped it, when Brad’s voice, croaky with sleep, startled her, almost knocking her backwards off her haunches.
‘You’re not leaving already, are you?’
His hand caught her wrist, his thumb trailing up her forearm, raising goose bumps in its wake. Georgia froze, fighting the urge to slip back between the sheets.
She took a deep breath and banished the errant thought to a darkened, soundproof corner of her mind.
‘I need an early start. I have a full diary today.’
‘Pity. Last night was fantastic. You were fantastic,’ Brad corrected himself. He closed his eyes; dark feathered lashes contrasted against his tanned skin. He released her wrist, allowing her to extract her hand from the bed sheets and snap the thong into her purse.
She was fantastic?
Good to know.
The cocktail party where she met Brad had been thrown by the partners at the law firm where she worked. It was held in Georgia’s honour, to announce her becoming partner, in a private room at one of the smartest hotels in the city, and it had been okay. She had expected to be bored out of her brain, having to make small talk all evening with the other two partners, a couple of greying old stuffed shirts, but with the gourmet canapés, excellent champagne, and the whole office invited, she had actually had a good time.
She hadn’t planned this. She hadn’t even known Brad Spencer would be there. But then she hadn’t known he lived in the hotel either, or that the other partners knew him well enough to invite him to join the party.
‘Likewise, a fantastic night,’ she replied, but almost before she got the words out, 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 didn’t need a butler. Having a butler in twenty-first century Australia was bloody ridiculous. Requisitioning one of the hotel cleaners for a few hours a week would have been perfectly adequate, but he had inherited Jeffrey, along with the penthouse over the hotel and the majority of his father’s assets. While theoretically only the butler, Jeffrey was practically a member of the family. As annoying as some of the older man’s habits were, Brad would never let him go. Jeffrey had a place with the Spencer family as long as he wanted it.
‘I had a woman sneak out on me this morning, and I can’t remember the last time that happened.’
Normally if he took a woman home, she would loiter around in the morning angling for breakfast, or an invitation for a second date, but Georgia Murray had left without so much as a goodbye kiss.
The stunning, blonde, blue-eyed woman had made her stealthy exit in much the same way that he had left a number of other women’s bedrooms over the years.
‘Oh dear, sir. Well, it comes to us all eventually. None of us is getting any younger. Perhaps you should think about settling down.’
The butler picked up a starched napkin and polished an imaginary spot on the tabletop, sounding tentative, as if he were testing the waters to say more.
Brad took a sip of his coffee.
Having only just reached his mid-thirties, Brad didn’t think it was time to panic. After all, based on last night he was still capable of pulling a twenty-something, even if she had done a disappearing act in the morning.
‘Yes, I must be losing my touch,’ Brad said, feigning agreement and returning to the business section of the newspaper, while keeping a surreptitious eye on his butler. He had known Jeffrey for thirty-two of his thirty-four years, and he was pretty sure that his butler was working up to saying something that in all probability, he wasn’t going to like.
Jeffrey set down the napkin and retrieved a silver tray from the sideboard, placing it on the table beside Brad.
‘Only two messages this morning, sir. One is from Mrs Spencer. She says she is finding the London summer rather agreeable and plans to stay on until September, by which time our winter should be over. She wants you to pick up her responsibilities for the Spencer Charitable Trust until she gets back.’
Brad folded his newspaper in half and swatted it down on the table.
‘Of course she does.’