Legally Addicted - By Lena Dowling Page 0,23

are in bedrooms further down, the room next to yours is mine, and the one directly across the hall is your closest bathroom,’ he called back over his shoulder, carrying on into the living room.

After the obligatory introductions to the wives, an older man who had been working in the adjoining kitchen pressed a glass of sparkling wine into her hand. She looked around for a place to sit. With two full sized sofas occupied by John Dayton and his wife Beverley, and Roger Llewellyn and his wife Vera, there appeared nowhere free.

‘Here, come and sit beside me, Georgia. I promise I won’t bite.’

Brad patted the space beside him on a smaller two-seater. Make that a one-and-half-seater, she thought as she sat down and her thigh brushed his. He didn’t flinch and with little space to move, she was trapped against him. The heat emanating from his leg travelled through her thigh, circulating outwards and causing an unexpected sensation higher up.

She looked around, but there were no other guests. It seemed as if Brad didn’t have a date for the weekend after all. Her head said it didn’t matter, while her body, stupidly happy that she didn’t have to suffer seeing him with someone new, hummed an entirely different tune.

‘So what’s the story behind this place, Brad? It’s got a stunning view, but I’m sure it wasn’t what any of us were expecting as the beach house of the son of the late king of Sydney construction.’ Llewellyn piped up, asking what Georgia, and probably everyone else, was thinking.

Brad stretched out and leaned back, so that he was pressed even more tightly against her.

‘This is where it all begun. When Dad completed his apprenticeship he started his own building company and saved up for this place and all of the land around it. Then he applied to have the zoning laws changed and when that eventually came through he was able to subdivide the block into twenty plots. He built one house to sell in order to make the money to build the next and so on. All the houses started out looking like this, but most have now either been replaced, or modified and extended so much you wouldn’t know.

His guests gave polite smiles, nevertheless confused as to why the house had not been given more of a facelift like its neighbours. Brad shrugged, stood up, and headed for a set of French doors that opened on to a deck facing the beach.

‘See this first mark here,’ Brad pointed to a gouge a couple of feet up off the floor on the doorframe. It was the first of several other horizontal marks. ‘That is how tall I was when Dad sold his first house.’

Imagining Brad as a toddler melted something solid in Georgia’s chest. It was hard to visualise anyone as powerful as Brad as ever having been innocent or vulnerable, but seeing him like this, in understated surroundings, it was if he had been laid bare. The pride in his voice as he talked about the oldest shabbiest house in the street caught something in Georgia’s throat, and she quickly took a gulp of her wine rather than analyse what the feelings might be about.

‘Oh, and I’m sure you would have been the most darling baby too. What do you think, Georgia?’ Beverley Dayton asked.

Georgia took another long, deliberate sip of her drink, giving her time to think. She was about to deflect Beverley’s question by saying he was probably a little devil when Vera Llewellyn answered for her.

‘Cute as a button — I’ll bet he started charming the ladies in kindergarten.’

Brad rolled his eyes and laughed the comment off.

‘Alright men, what do you say to making fire and charring some fish?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Llewellyn said, climbing to his feet first, with Dayton following after him, trailing Brad outside through the double doors to a barbeque out on the deck.

‘What about you, Georgia?’ Beverley asked as the men went outside. ‘Do you have a husband?’

‘No, I’m still single.’

‘Are you? Well, how fortuitous. Bradley would be an excellent catch,’ Vera chimed in.

‘I couldn’t. We work together.’ Georgia shook her head.

‘Work together?’ The two women exchanged a look. ‘How do you think we met our husbands?’

Georgia wanted to point out that it was different when a partnership was at stake, but that would have ruffled the women’s feathers. If they met their husbands at work, she guessed they must have been secretaries. The paralegals and legal secretaries kept the