Legally Addicted Read Free

up in her own work to have forgotten all about it. Miriam, however, was hot on the trail of what had happened the night before and wasn’t going to be easily put off.
    ‘Does the requirement for new clothes have anything to do with a certain Brad Spencer?’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Georgia said, trying to appear genuinely surprised but failing miserably, sounding instead like she had just delivered the line from a bad school play.
    ‘Come on, Georgia, everyone is talking about the fact that you left the cocktail party with Brad last night.’
    ‘Well they can stop gossiping, because nothing happened. We had dinner, that’s all.’
    ‘Uh, huh. Well, I hope you didn’t give him your usual love ‘em and leave ‘em treatment, because Bradley Spencer is a catch with a capital C.’
    ‘There was no loving, and no leaving. Just dinner, okay?’
    ‘I’ll believe you, but thousands wouldn’t,’ Miriam said in a singsong voice as she left the office to return to her own workstation.
    Georgia switched on her laptop with a pang of guilt. She wouldn’t normally have felt bad lying to her secretary about a personal matter, but over the last few months Miriam had wheedled her way around her defences. Now Georgia almost counted the woman as a friend.
    But right now, Georgia had a full day ahead, and she needed to get her head around a difficult new file; a matrimonial involving several businesses and multiple assets that would mean studying complicated balance sheets and financial statements.
    ‘Is he as good in bed as they say?’
    Miriam’s head had reappeared back around her office door.
    Without thinking Georgia answered. ‘Yes. What? No. How would I know?’
    ‘Ha! Gotcha. You said yes first.’
    Damn it. Now she had blown it. Next, Miriam would be suggesting coffee and wanting the sordid details.
    ‘Haven’t you got work to be getting on with?’ An edge had crept into Georgia’s voice as she started to lose patience with her secretary’s prying, however good natured the intention.
    ‘Okay, okay, I get it. You don’t want to talk about it. But have you looked at the new stationery?’
    Georgia’s attention snapped to the box in her in-tray that she had so far failed to open. Pulling it out on to the middle of her desk, she ripped open the package. A ream of letter grade bond paper gleamed under the brown paper wrapper, and a few seconds later her eyes zeroed in on what Miriam was referring to. The firm’s name on the letterhead had changed: Dayton Llewellyn Murray .
    ‘Excellent, very nice, thanks.’
    She tried to sound pleased but not overexcited.
    Inside, however, was a different matter. Inside, she was leaping over office furniture and punching the air.
    Since she had recently turned twenty-nine, success had been a close run thing, but she could now strike ‘make partner by the age of thirty’ off her bucket list. Okay, so she wasn’t a full equity partner, yet, but that was only a matter of time.
    Miriam was always telling her she was too driven, sacrificing too much to her work. Well, there was nothing wrong with having goals, and now Georgia had the absolute proof.
    Her single-mindedness had already allowed her to strike out ‘get a scholarship to law school’ and ‘find employment with a respected firm’. With her recent achievement, she only had one ambition left on her list to fulfil: convincing the board at the Dockton Women’s Shelter to back her proposal to establish an addiction centre. Based on the lukewarm reaction from philanthropic socialite and Dockton Women’s Shelter board chairwoman, Caro Marsden, that could be overreaching things. Still, Georgia now had irrefutable evidence that with determination and focus, anything was possible.
    Later that morning, when Georgia took her place at the conference table for her first partners’ meeting with Roger Llewellyn and John Dayton, anyone looking at her would have thought she was completely unaffected by the enormity of the occasion.