All They Need - By Sarah Mayberry Page 0,40

know when to expect the courier, okay?”

“All right.”

He hesitated, tempted to apologize for the gut-spilling and associated other self-indulgences of the evening. Then he decided that he should quit while he was ahead.

“I’ll see you later, Mel,” he said.

He ended the call and glanced at his neighbor’s window. There was a light on downstairs. With a bit of luck they’d be home. Otherwise he’d be forced to catch a cab to his parents’ place for the night.

Luck was with him and he was soon letting himself in with his spare key. He sent Mel a quick text, just in case she was worrying. She responded immediately:

Phew. Load off. Will get keys to you tomorrow.

He started composing a return text and then caught himself. He’d imposed himself on her enough for one day. Time to give the woman a break.

It didn’t stop him from thinking about her as he got ready for bed.

The way she’d thrown her car keys at him with no questions or caveats.

Her sympathetic patience as he’d talked about his father.

The admiration in her gaze as she looked over the design he’d sketched for her.

That moment this morning when she’d been adjusting the harness on the cutter and her fingers had brushed his belly and she’d looked up, straight into his eyes.

Mel Porter was one out of the box. Funny, smart, kind, generous—and, of course, sexy as hell.

Last night he’d decided that she wasn’t fling material because there was a vulnerability in her that demanded patience and commitment that he simply didn’t have to offer at the moment. But it hit him suddenly that he’d gotten it completely ass-about. The reason Mel wasn’t fling material wasn’t because she was vulnerable, it was because she was a keeper.

One night with her would never be enough.

It was the last thought he had before he drifted off to sleep.

MEL WOKE IN muffled darkness, covered in sweat. Her legs were bound, she couldn’t breathe…?. She flailed and kicked and suddenly was fully awake, in her bed, the sheets wrapped around her legs, the quilt over her face. She batted it away, kicked her legs free and reached for the bedside light. Golden light shone up the wall and she blinked. Her heart was pounding away, her pulse vibrating in her neck. She moved to the edge of the bed and stood, shivering in the cold with her clammy skin. She grabbed a towel from the ensuite, stripped off her pajamas and rubbed herself down. She found a fresh pair of pajamas in the chest of drawers and pulled them on. She straightened the covers, then got into bed on the opposite side, where the sheets weren’t damp from her panicky sweat.

She lay on her side, legs curled up, doing her best not to read too much into the nightmare. She’d had a lot of them in the early days after she and Owen separated, and she’d thought she was past them.

Apparently not.

Fragments from her dream floated back to her: Owen sitting beside her in the car, hands tight on the steering wheel, his silent, oppressive anger pushing her into her seat; Owen yelling at her, again, for getting it wrong, pacing up and down in their bedroom; her standing in a ballroom full of beautiful, glittering people, yet feeling utterly isolated and alone.

A delightful highlight reel from her marriage, although she’d left out a couple of doozies. Maybe they were still lurking in her subconscious somewhere, waiting to disturb the rest of her night. Lucky her.

She wondered idly what had come first—her becoming entwined in the bedclothes, or the dream with all its attendant memories of how trapped she’d felt in her marriage. Chicken or egg, dream or entanglement.

It probably didn’t matter. And perhaps it was timely for her to remember exactly how bad it had been, given the arrival of Flynn in her life and the conversation she’d had with her sister tonight. Perhaps it was a damned good thing for her to revisit exactly how powerless and trapped she’d felt. She’d been bound to her marriage in so many different ways—by expectation, by her vows, by pride, by her inability to fully comprehend how ugly things had become between them, by crippling self-doubt that had been fed by years of her husband’s criticisms, large and small.

Like water on a rock he’d worn her down until she’d started to believe the things he said to her. That she was stupid. That she was responsible for his failure to make headway with