All They Need

chapter FOURTEEN



MEL STARED AT THE KEY for a long beat before shifting her focus to the cutting board.

“I don’t need a key,” she said, trying to keep her voice as casual as possible as she chopped the remainder of the parsley.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Flynn’s hand drop to his side.

“You don’t think it would make life easier?”

“I didn’t mind waiting. Besides, this is your place.”

“Sure. But I’m happy to share it with you.”

She put the knife down and turned to face him, a part of her recognizing that this conversation had been inevitable. Her expectations and Flynn’s had always been on a collision course.

“I’m happy to share it with you. But it’s always going to be yours,” she said carefully. “Just as my place is always going to be mine.”

He was twisting the cork out of the bottle but he stopped with the cork only half extracted, setting the bottle on the counter.

“Why do I feel as though we’re suddenly have a much bigger conversation?”

“Maybe because we are. And maybe because we should, before this thing between us goes any further.”

He frowned slightly. “Thing. I didn’t realize we were a thing.”



“Relationship,” she said. It was hard to get the word past the tightness in her throat. “This relationship.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m happy to lay my cards on the table. More than happy. This is serious for me, Mel. I want you to be a part of my life.”

His gaze was steady and very serious and her heart seemed to expand and contract at the same time. Was it possible to be both thrilled and terrified simultaneously? Because that was how she felt—enormously gratified, and yet also scared to death.

“I feel the same way.” Anxiety was making her feel light-headed and she swallowed noisily.

“But you don’t want my key?”

“I made myself a promise after Owen and I separated that I would never let myself get trapped in a situation like that again. That I would never put myself in another person’s power in that way. That no matter what, I would always hang on to who I am.”

“I know your marriage was unhappy. But I’m still not sure how that relates to you having a key to my place.”

“Because if I take your key, you’ll expect mine. And then the next thing I know your things will be at my place and my things will be here, and then suddenly we’ll be living together…?. And I don’t want that. I can’t do that again.” It came out in a garbled rush.

He took a moment before he responded. “I know this has been hard for you, Mel. I know that you weren’t looking for a relationship so soon after your divorce. I get that, and I’m willing to wait as long as it takes for you to feel safe about us. Whatever it takes. We don’t have to rush into anything.”

“Time isn’t going to make any difference, Flynn.” It was hard to make herself say the words but she had to. Had to make him understand that if things were going to continue between them, there would be certain limitations. “I don’t ever want to live with a man again. And I definitely never want to get married.”

He didn’t move, didn’t say a word, but she could see she’d shocked him. It took him a moment to respond.

“Like I said, I’m willing to wait as long as it takes. We can take things one day at a time,” he finally said.

“It’s not going to change anything. I know what I want, and what I don’t want. I don’t want to lose myself to a relationship again.”

He stared at her, and she could see the dawning understanding in his eyes as he realized that she was serious. That this was a deal breaker for her.

His gaze dropped to the floor and he lifted his hand to rub his forehead, masking his expression from her for long seconds.

“It doesn’t change the way I feel about you. I love spending time with you. I’d like to keep spending time with you,” she said quietly.

He nodded but didn’t drop his hand. Something big and heavy was sitting in the pit of her stomach. She’d hurt him. Shocked him. He wanted her to have his key. He was serious about her. And she’d hurt him.

“Flynn, I’m really sorry,” she said helplessly.

Her gaze fell on the chopped parsley and garlic. Tears burned the back of her eyes. She liked this man so much. But she understood that what she’d said may have killed off any possibility between them, including the ones that scared her.

“If you want me to go, I can go. If you need time to think… I understand,” she said.

“I don’t want you to go, Mel. That’s pretty much the point, really, isn’t it?” He lifted his head and looked at her, his blue eyes blazing with intensity. “I’m crazy about you. I don’t want you to go anywhere.”

Even though she was half-afraid she wouldn’t be welcome, she stepped forward and threw her arms around him. His arms came around her at the same time and they held each other tightly.

“Mel…”

She cupped the back of his head and pressed her cheek against his. He was such a special man. So beautiful, inside and out. But she simply could not risk herself again the way she had during her marriage. She’d already come so much further so much faster with Flynn than she’d imagined she could, but she didn’t have it in her to go further again. The thought of it alone was enough to push her into genuine panic.

She never wanted to feel as weak and helpless as she had during her marriage, and the only way she knew to do that was to protect herself against everyone. Including Flynn, and including herself.

“I know you don’t like talking about your marriage, but you have to know that I would never hurt you, Mel,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion.

“I know. And I trust you. But I have to look after myself. That’s what I learned from my marriage—that I can’t expect anyone else to do that for me.”

They drew apart. Flynn still looked shell-shocked. Maybe even a little shattered. She ached for him, wishing she could find the one thing to say that would make everything okay between them.

“Look, if you need time, I can go. I really don’t mind,” she offered again.

He shook his head. “I just need to get my head around this.” He picked up the bottle and yanked the cork out, but he didn’t pour the wine into the glasses he’d set out. Instead, he looked at the bottle as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

“I guess what I’m trying to understand is how you see this working between us, if living together and marriage are out of the question,” he said after a moment. “What do you see happening between us?”

His gaze was piercing, searching as it met hers.

“We keep doing what we’ve been doing,” she said. “We spend weekends together, nights during the week. It doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t change what we have together.”

“It changes a lot of things, Mel. What about children, for starters?”

She blinked in surprise.

“Or hadn’t you even gotten that far yet?” He sounded sad.

She shook her head. “I hadn’t. I guess— I hadn’t.”

She hadn’t allowed herself to go there. When she’d first married Owen she’d wanted children, but at a certain point in her marriage she’d become profoundly grateful that she hadn’t gotten pregnant.

But Flynn was not Owen, and if she’d stopped to really think about it she would have anticipated this question because Flynn was a man made for family life. The way he cared for his parents, his bone-deep nurturing instincts… He would make a great father.

“I need to check on the garden. Make sure the timer tap is working…”

It was the feeblest of excuses, but she let him go, watching him walk from the room, his shoulders very square. She let her breath out in a rush and pressed her hands to her stomach.

She felt sick. In protecting herself, she’d hurt a wonderful man. A man she cared for a great deal. A man who had become very important to her very quickly.

You may have lost him. You know that, right?

The possibility reverberated inside her, grim and very real. Flynn had had plans for them, hopes. Expectations. She’d seen it in his eyes. He’d even said it—I want to share my life with you. And she’d fenced off a lot of those hopes and expectations. She’d corralled him into a relationship that operated on her terms, for her protection.

She closed her eyes, thinking about the confusion and hurt she’d seen in his face. He didn’t understand that she had reasons—good reasons—for her decisions. He said he did, but he couldn’t, not really, because she’d never told him the truth about her marriage. She’d been too ashamed. And he’d never asked, because he was too good a man to push her into something he knew she found uncomfortable.

She opened her eyes. Then she walked to the counter and poured herself a glass of wine. She swallowed it in one big gulp. The wine warmed her throat before it hit her stomach. She stared into the glass, thinking about what she needed to do.

After a few seconds she put down the glass and went in search of Flynn.



HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND. That was the bottom line. Flynn knew Mel was scared and wary, but he hadn’t understood that her resistance to a relationship ran so deep, and he didn’t understand how anyone could close herself off to the future so comprehensively.

Mel had always struck him as being brave and bold. Her laughter, her smile, her earthy sexuality—he’d always thought she was the sort of person who took life by the scruff of the neck and shook it.

Yet she didn’t want to live with him. She didn’t want marriage. And she hadn’t even thought about children.

He sat on the sandstone bench on his rooftop garden and put his head in his hands. He felt as though he’d had the rug—the world—pulled from beneath his feet. All his life he’d waited to feel this connected to another human being, yet Mel didn’t want the connection. Or, more accurately, she wanted parts of it. Neatly apportioned parts. The friendship. The sex. The companionship.

She didn’t want shared responsibility and domesticity and the sort of deep, abiding knowledge of another person only gained through sleeping in the same bed night after night and sharing both the highs and lows and the grand and the not-so-grand challenges of life. She didn’t want children. She didn’t want to truly share herself and her life with him.

The worst thing was that he’d known, on some deep, instinctive level, that she wasn’t as committed as he was. And yet he’d still fallen in love with her. Hadn’t been able to stop himself.

He heard the scratch of dirt beneath a shoe and knew that Mel had come in search of him. He didn’t lift his head immediately, unsure that he could keep the disappointment he felt from showing in his face.

“I want to tell you something, but it’s really hard for me to talk about because it’s not something I’m very proud of,” she said.

Her words surprised him into lifting his head. He met her gaze.

“You can tell me anything, Mel.” He meant it, too. He loved her.



She sat beside him on the bench and took a deep breath.

“People always say that it’s impossible to understand a marriage from the outside looking in. I never really appreciated how true that was until I left Owen, because looking back over the six years we’d been together, even I couldn’t understand how things had gotten so ugly between us. How I’d let them get so ugly. Intellectually, I understand that it happened in increments, that one thing led to another, which led to another. I know that by the time we got to the end of the line, I was so worn down by his disapproval and anger, and his parents’ lack of acceptance, and by my own feelings of inadequacy and failure that I believed the things he said to me. My brain can see all that and process it and join the dots. But there’s a big part of me that still doesn’t understand why I let him treat me so badly.”

He drew breath to speak but Mel’s hand landed on his thigh.

“Please. Let me get this out. I want you to understand where I’m coming from. Why this is so important to me. And if I stop, it’ll take me ages to find the courage again.”

He nodded, then realized that perhaps she couldn’t see him in the dark.

“Okay.”

“Thanks.”

She was silent for a long moment after that and he started to think that maybe she’d changed her mind.

“You were there the night of the Hollands’ party. You saw what happened with the fountain. In case it wasn’t obvious, Owen was furious with me afterward. He didn’t talk all the way home in the car, not a single word, and when we got home he made me strip in the front hall. He said it was in case the carpet got wet, but it was really because he wanted to humiliate me the way I’d humiliated him.

“The whole time, he stood there and told me how stupid I was. How I’d shamed him. How every man at the party had seen my body and knew how cheap I was. He told me that I was a laughingstock and that I’d made him a laughingstock. Then he told me to go into the living room and take off my underwear.”

He stirred beside her. His whole body was hot and tense as he guessed what was coming next.

“He told me to bend over the arm of the couch, and he screwed me from behind. Then he told me I was lucky he still wanted me.”

She’d been staring at the tiles on the terrace, her expression blank, but now she lifted her gaze to his. “And I let him. I let him treat me like that, Flynn.”

“Mel—”

“I know what you’re going to say. That it wasn’t my fault, that he was emotionally abusive, that I was a victim. It’s all true. But I still allowed it to happen. I allowed him to talk to me the way other people talk to their dogs. I let him use my body. I accepted his parents’ judgment of me. I turned myself inside out trying to please him. Me, Flynn. No one else. That’s why I won’t live with you. And that’s why I will never marry again. Ever.”

Flynn wasn’t a violent man. He’d been in exactly one real, knock-down, drag-out fight in his life. But if Owen Hunter walked through the door right now, he would take him apart with his bare hands. No hesitation. And he wouldn’t stop until the other man was begging for mercy.

The thought of Mel living with someone who spoke to her that way, who used her that way… It literally made him ill. She was so funny and generous and loving and beautiful and sexy. How anyone could fail to love her he didn’t know—and how anyone could take her love and turn it against her that way…

It beggared belief.

“It’s not your fault.” He paused, trying to gather his thoughts. How to explain the gut-wrenching sympathy he felt for her? How to acknowledge the shame he could hear in her voice? How to even begin to express the sadness and anger and regret he felt on her behalf? “Anyone who would treat someone they purportedly love like that is a freaking head case and doesn’t deserve to walk the streets. He’s an abusive a*shole, Mel. And you were his victim.”

She nodded, but he wasn’t entirely sure that she really believed him. Never had he felt so inarticulate. So out of his depth.

“It’s okay, Flynn. You don’t have to convince me or fix this for me. I know what it is. I know it better than anyone. I just wanted you to know, to understand. This isn’t about you. This is all me. All of it.”

He gave in to his instincts and twisted to face her, wrapping her in his arms. She came willingly, her breath leaving her on a little shudder. She rested her chin on his shoulder and he could feel her working hard to control herself.

“Thank you for hearing me out,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “I know I hurt you tonight. I know I can’t give you everything that you want. But I care for you so much, Flynn. So much.”

He turned his head and pressed a kiss to her temple. For the first time since he’d known her, she felt fragile in his arms. Funny how a shift in perception could do that. All this time, he’d known she was wounded, but he hadn’t understood how deep the wounds went, how profound the damage was. And, also, how strong she was to have rescued herself and rebuilt her life.

I love you, Melanie Porter.

The words filled his mind and his chest but he was smart enough not to let them pass his lips. Now was not the time to burden Mel with his feelings.

He finally understood what he was up against. He’d been so certain that he had only to be patient, to give Mel time to get past her wariness, but her instinct to protect herself went far deeper than wariness. She’d learned a powerful, visceral lesson, and she was determined to never forget it.

Even if that meant keeping him at arm’s length.

If he accepted her rules, if he decided to continue with their weeknights and their weekends, he would be condemning himself to enormous frustration. Among other things.

But it wasn’t as though he had a choice.

He kissed her temple again. “We should probably make dinner, yeah? Otherwise we’ll be gnawing our arms off sometime soon.”

She pulled back enough to see his face, her gaze searching. He held her eye.

“I’m not going anywhere, Mel,” he said, answering the unspoken question in her eyes.

How could he? He loved her.



“A thousand men would.”

“Not this man.”

He stood, tugging her to her feet as well. “Let’s finish making dinner.”



LATER THAT NIGHT, Mel lay in bed beside Flynn listening to his steady breathing. Now that it was safe, she let the tears she’d been holding in all night slide down her face.

She was glad she’d told him, glad that he knew now, but a part of her felt small and ashamed and wrong and incredibly exposed. Flynn had always looked at her with admiration in his eyes. She didn’t want his pity. She didn’t want him to see her as weak or helpless or a victim. She knew it was inevitable that he would, to a certain extent, because she had been a victim, yet a part of her—her pride? her ego?—wanted him only to see good things in her.

She thought about the way he’d held her afterward, the way he’d kissed her temple so tenderly, so gently, and the way he’d made love to her tonight, as though she was the most precious thing in the world to him, and her tears fell faster. More than anything she wished she could give him what he wanted, what he needed. He deserved to be happy. She wished she was braver. She wished she had the courage to throw caution to the wind and leap feetfirst into everything he offered.

A sob rose in her throat and she swallowed it, using her fingers to wipe her tears away. Breathing through her mouth, she took deep belly breaths until she’d calmed herself.

I’m not going anywhere.

He’d said those words to her only a couple of hours ago, so there was no need for her to be lying here crying and grieving over a loss that hadn’t happened. He’d heard her, he’d understood her and he wasn’t going anywhere.

She turned toward him, wrapping her arms around his body from behind, curving her legs to fit behind his. He stirred in his sleep, his hand settling over hers to keep her arm in place. She lay her cheek against his back and inhaled his scent and allowed her body to absorb his calm, solid warmth.

Slowly, by small degrees, she drifted off to sleep. She woke to the feel of his mouth on her breasts the next morning and they had lazy morning sex before Flynn rolled out of bed and hit the shower. She joined him and left when he did, waving out the window of her car as he headed to work in the Aston.

She was aware of a certain tremulous fragility within herself as she took the ramp to the freeway. She reminded herself that while last night had been hard, they’d survived it. Flynn knew where she stood, and he knew why, and he hadn’t pushed her away or become angry or demanding or resentful.

They were going to be okay. For the short term, anyway.

She bit her lip as she thought about what she was asking of Flynn in the long term, what she was asking him to give up, then quickly pushed the thought away. Tomorrow was tomorrow. Right now—today—things were okay. That was what she needed to concentrate on.