Mel B Reveals Why She's Marrying Rory McPhee After Swearing She'd Never Wed Again: 'I Believe in Love' (Exclusive)

Melanie “Mel B” Brown is ready to walk down the aisle.

The Spice Girls singer, 48, has found her happily ever after with fiancé Rory McPhee — and is currently in the process of planning a wedding she never thought she’d have.

“I was like, ‘I'm never going to get married again. Never, never, never. I'm never having a relationship. I'm fine by myself. I want to raise my kids, put my head down and work, and that's it,’” the star tells PEOPLE. “And then… never can say never, can you?”

Brown and McPhee, a hairstylist, have been family friends for years, as he is the best friend of her cousin. She still remembers her first impression of him all those years ago: “I was like, ‘Oh, god, boys will be boys, whatever.’ He’s just a friend, a family friend, nothing like that.”

But after she moved back home to Leeds in 2019, McPhee reentered the picture — and before long, their relationship had blossomed “organically” into something romantic.

“He was just there patiently waiting, always there to give me a hair treatment, always there to talk. He’s a great listener. And he just became more and more of a friend, and more and more important in my life,” she says. “It’d been a long time that anybody was that kind to me. I wasn’t looking for intimacy or anything like that because I was still suffering a lot from PTSD. And he was just patient. He read the first draft of my book. He just couldn’t believe that a person that says they loved you would treat you like that.”

The singer chronicles the start of her relationship with McPhee in a new expanded version of her 2018 memoir Brutally Honest, released earlier this month. Over three new chapters, Brown reveals just how much she’s still affected by the alleged abuse inflicted upon her by her second husband, Stephen Belafonte, to whom she was married from 2007 to 2017 — and just how much McPhee has helped her.

“I believe in love, and clearly the other two marriages turned out to be not love, from their angle,” says Brown, who was also married to Jimmy Gulzar from 1998 to 2000. “So I feel like I've really missed out, and now I've got this opportunity to be properly in love with a really good guy who I know loves me for me, who's known me before I was a Spice Girl, why wouldn't I do that?” 

Brown says McPhee has helped her realize “that there are good people out there,” and also notes that he even knew her father Martin before he died in 2017, which provided another level of “built-in safety and trust and respect.”

He’s also taken well to life as a family man (Brown is mom to Phoenix, 25, Angel, 16, and Madison, 12).

“He loves my kids,” she says. “He’s more of a friend to my kids. They really adore him.”

Brown previously revealed that because she’s an MBE, she and McPhee will tie the knot at the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral in London — but is still waiting on a date for the wedding to be provided by the venue.

“When I get the date, then I can get really excited about it,” she says. “I’m not letting myself yet!”