**Spoilers ... only read on if you've read Flawed **

So you made it to the end of Flawed and thought to yourself, what the hell has this author just written?

Dude meets girl. Dude has a bad attitude, treats her shoddily and ultimately ... well, he hammers the nails into the coffin himself, doesn't he?

Dude has a son. Doesn't treat him very well either.

Did you think, is this author for real? Why would she do that? It wasn't an HEA. It wasn't really a HFN. It was an epic fail.

I'll let you into a secret, shall I?

Flawed is the story of a relationship that was never-meant-to-be. I get it. It's a romance and the reader has expectations. At the very least, a HFN is a compromise on a HEA.

I didn't give you that though, did I?

Nobody has a good word to say about Paul Jackson, so in that respect I achieved what I set out to do.

It could be argued, however, that in a romance you need to have something to latch onto otherwise what's the point?

The point is that if Scarlett didn't meet Paul Jackson, then it would be unlikely that she'd meet Dev Jackson. They didn't move in the same circles. He's four years younger than her. He's still at school while she's in her last year of uni. Seriously, where would they have met? Anyway, I loved writing about the older man, younger woman, even if he was a douche!

Flawed is about a broken relationship that can't be fixed but the undercurrent - the real story - is the developing friendship between Scarlett and Dev. The Definition series was always about Letts and Dev.

Originally Flawed started out as a prologue in Stripped but there was just too much story. I made the decision to pull it and go back to the beginning by writing Flawed. It practically wrote itself because it was written after Stripped and Craving so the characters were already fully formed in my head.

I knew that creating Paul as a drunken womaniser would be risky but I decided to do it anyway.

Rightly or wrongly, sometimes you've just got to follow your gut.

So I did!