Married...Again Read online

  The only thing she wasn’t prepared for was life itself...

  Eleanor desperately loved her husband, Max Harper, but when he chose his research work over their marriage one more time, she had no choice but to file for divorce. She couldn’t know that his ship would go down in a storm in the North Atlantic. Two years later, she’s buried him in the past, launched a thriving business and even started dating again. She’s getting her life together and she’s doing just great, she tells anybody who asks her. But she’s absolutely not prepared for what—or who—is about to step into her mom’s study next...

  “Max! You’re not listening to me.”

  “Eleanor, I’m hearing you loud and clear. Now you’re not listening to me. I don’t do threats. I don’t do ultimatums. I have a real opportunity to collect meaningful data that might help people really see what’s happening to our planet. I’m sorry but that’s more important than four months of our marriage.”

  “No, Max,” she said sadly. “What you mean is that it’s more important than me.”

  “Nor...”

  She took a step away. “Stay safe.”

  “I’ll see you in four months.”

  She shook her head. “No. You won’t.”

  He wrapped a hand around her neck and forced her to hold still for his kiss. Not that he ever had to force her to kiss him. Kissing Max Harper was her own particular addiction.

  And this might be their last kiss.

  Knowing that, she clung to him. Wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him everything that she was. Everything that she ever would be.

  Until finally she couldn’t take it anymore and she pulled away.

  When she did, she was crying. “I love you, Max Harper.”

  “I know. Which is how I know I’ll see you in four months.”

  Dear Reader,

  Does anyone remember the TV show General Hospital? I used to love soap operas growing up as a kid. There was always that favorite character who “died”...which really meant he or she tried to get a job in a movie or a nighttime TV show. If that didn’t happen, he or she could always miraculously return in dramatic fashion as undead.

  That germ was the basis for Max and Eleanor. A couple who truly loved each other, but it wasn’t enough to keep them together. However, when something life changing happens, it’s easy to see how priorities can shift.

  I hope you root for this couple as much as I did while writing them.

  I love to hear from readers, so you can find me at stephaniedoyle.net.

  Stephanie

  STEPHANIE DOYLE

  Married...Again

  Stephanie Doyle, a dedicated romance reader, began to pen her own romantic adventures at age sixteen. She began submitting to Harlequin at age eighteen and by twenty-six her first book was published. Fifteen years later, she still loves what she does, as each book is a new adventure. She lives in South Jersey with her cat, Hermione, the designated princess of the house. When Stephanie’s not reading or writing, in the summer she is most likely watching a baseball game and eating a hot dog.

  Books by Stephanie Doyle

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  Her Secret Service Agent

  The Bakers of Baseball

  The Comeback of Roy Walker

  Scout’s Honor

  Betting on the Rookie

  The Way Back

  One Final Step

  An Act of Persuasion

  For the First Time

  Remembering That Night

  HARLEQUIN ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  Suspect Lover

  The Doctor’s Deadly Affair

  SILHOUETTE BOMBSHELL

  Calculated Risk

  The Contestant

  Possessed

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Excerpt from A Cop’s Honor by Emilie Rose

  Chapter One

  Trondheim Research Facility, Norway

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE you right now,” Eleanor Harper shouted at her husband even as he walked down the stairs away from her.

  “Nor, I’m not going to have this fight,” he said over his shoulder.

  “No! No! You are going to have this fight. We are going to have this fight. Max, stop!”

  He stopped at the door, his packed duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He turned to her, and she could see it in his expression. Before he even opened his mouth, she knew that he wasn’t going to back down.

  That all the yelling and pleading and begging in the world wasn’t going to change this.

  He huffed. “Nor! This is who I am. This is what I do. Do you get that? I’m an oceanographer who studies the impact of climate change on the ocean. This planet is dying one damn inch at a time. I have to do this work now. We’ve talked about this before. I thought I had your support.”

  That wasn’t fair. This wasn’t about her not supporting his work. “You do have my support. You have all the support a wife should give to her husband, but where is my support? You dragged me to this research facility, and I said fine. I’ll go where you go. No questions asked. Then as soon as we get here you’re turning around and leaving me. For months at a time. I have no friends here, no family.”

  Max rolled his eyes. “Oh, please, Nor, don’t sit there and tell me you’re pining away for your mother.”

  “That’s not the point. Like it or not, she’s my mother. I miss my family. My sister. I miss my life back home. And none of that would matter if I had you. But now you tell me you’re leaving me again. Not for three months this time, but four months. That’s almost half of a year. I’m supposed to just sit around here and wait for you?”

  Eleanor watched as he dropped the duffel on the floor beside him. Maybe she was getting through to him.

  “It’s not fair, Max. It’s not, and you can’t tell me otherwise.”

  He walked toward her and put his hands on her shoulders, pressed his forehead to hers.

  So close she could smell him. She loved the scent of him. No matter how long he’d been on shore, to her he always smelled like the ocean.

  “Nor, look at me. There are times you have to accept that some things are bigger than any one person. Bigger than any one relationship. Four months is nothing to us. A blip in our life.”

  She shook her head and stepped out of his reach. “No, it’s four months this time. Then five months the next time. Then a year after that. It’s always going to be you needing to be on the ocean finding more and more data. Thinking you can prove that climate change is happening and suddenly everyone will listen to you.”

  “Yes, Nor. The data I collect. It’s important. Not just for me but for everyone on thi
s planet.”

  “You have to make a choice. You have to choose. A life with me or a life on the ocean. But you can’t have both.”

  He frowned. “Ultimatums? You’re sitting there, right now, issuing me an ultimatum. How crappy is that?”

  Eleanor could feel tears welling up, but she worked hard to make sure her voice didn’t crack when she said it. “Max, do you love me?”

  “With everything I am.”

  She smiled sadly. Because it was true. It’s what she felt every day. But only when he was here. Only when he was with her. They had dated a mere seven months before he proposed. Before she accepted. Her mother had thought the proposal had come too soon. So much so that she refused to put together any kind of wedding until the two of them came to their senses and waited at least a year.

  Giving Eleanor no option other than the obvious one. They’d eloped. To this day, almost three years later, her mother was still furious about it.

  “We’ve been married nearly three years, and in that time we’ve only been together eighteen months. I can’t...I can’t...keep doing this.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time you thought about your own passions.”

  It felt like a slap of some kind. “What?”

  “Look, I know it’s hard when I’m gone. It’s hard for me, too. You think I like spending my days with a bunch of other smelly scientists and rough sailors on the freezing cold Arctic Ocean? I like spending my days with you. I like spending my nights with my wife. I like screwing my wife. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was vitally important. So while I’m gone, maybe you need to find that thing, too. The thing you think is important.”

  “I think you’re important,” Eleanor told him. Not sure why he was saying what he was saying.

  “Nor, I can’t be the only thing in your life. That is not the woman I married. You’re not this clingy weak thing. You are Eleanor Gaffney. You’re the girl who shook off her small Nebraska town, who found a way to put herself through school. You were going to rule the world. What happened to that girl?”

  You married her and took her to a research facility in northern Norway. Eleanor wanted to say those things, but it sounded pathetic in her own head. Then she did the only thing she could think of, the thing they had both talked about having.

  “We talked about getting pregnant this year,” she said.

  Another snort. “Really? You’re pulling the baby card?”

  The sound of his disbelief made her furious. “A baby is not a card. It’s supposed to be about having family. It’s what we both talked about wanting. We talked about doing it this year!”

  “Are you pregnant now?”

  “No,” she told him.

  “Then when I get back in four months, we’ll talk about this. But I mean it, Nor, you need to find out what you want to do with yourself, with your life. Because being my wife, and hell, being the mother to our future children, isn’t enough. You need something for you.”

  “I studied business! What the hell am I supposed to do with that in Trondheim? Create an ice-selling business? Oh, I know! What about a new pickled herring recipe?”

  He had the audacity to smile at her. “Are you going to kiss me goodbye? I’m running late as it is.”

  Eleanor shook her head as it finally settled on her. The truth. He was leaving. He was leaving, and his answer to that was she needed to find a hobby that would occupy her time while he was away.

  This was going to be her life. Watching him leave and waiting for him to come back. She hadn’t known that’s what it would be when she married him. She didn’t know that going in or she would have...

  You would have married him anyway. Your mother was right. You’re too stubborn for your own good.

  “I don’t think you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you. If you leave me, I’m leaving you.”

  Eleanor watched as his whole body tensed.

  Max shook his head. “You don’t mean it.”

  “Look at me, Max.” Eleanor stood in front of him, and she knew in her heart she meant every word she said. It would take all her courage to leave him, but she would do it. “I love you. Like no one I’ve ever loved before. But I can’t spend my life doing this. Watching you leave. So it might break me, but if you leave, then I’m gone.”

  “I’m not going to be brought to heel by my wife,” he snapped. “I’m not your damn dog.”

  “I’m not trying to do that. I’m trying to save our marriage. You think love is enough.”

  “It should be,” he shouted.

  “It’s not. It’s about compromise and working together and finding a solution. It’s not about you telling me the day before, Sorry, babe, I need to leave for a while, and that while is four months.”

  “The funding came though from Tom yesterday. I had no control over that. Or when the ship leaves. I told you that, too.”

  “Max! You’re not listening to me.”

  “Eleanor, I’m hearing you loud and clear. Now you’re not listening to me. I don’t do threats. I don’t do ultimatums. I have a real opportunity to collect meaningful data that might help people really see what’s happening to our planet. I’m sorry, but that’s more important than four months of our marriage.”

  She swallowed as the words penetrated her skull. “No, Max,” she said sadly. “What you mean is that it’s more important than me.”

  “Nor...”

  She took a step away. “Stay safe.”

  “I’ll see you in four months.”

  She shook her head. “No. You won’t.”

  He wrapped a hand around her neck and forced her to hold still for his kiss. Not that he ever had to force her to kiss him. Kissing Max Harper was her own particular addiction.

  And this might be their last kiss.

  Knowing that, she clung to him. Wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him everything that she was. Everything that she ever would be.

  Until finally she couldn’t take it anymore and she pulled away.

  When she did, she was crying. “I love you, Max Harper.”

  “I know. Which is how I know I’ll see you in four months.”

  Four months later

  HE HADN’T BELIEVED HER. When she said she would leave him, he just couldn’t believe she would do it. They loved each other. Sometimes almost too much. It was a scary thing to know how vulnerable you were when you loved someone that much.

  Which was why he hadn’t believed her when she said she would leave him.

  Except the empty house told its own story. So did the people they were renting it from.

  Mrs. Harper had left months ago. Right after he left on his trip.

  The only thing waiting for him was a large brown envelope with the name of an attorney’s office in the upper left corner.

  He wasn’t going to open it. He wasn’t going to see what she chose to throw away. He was going to do what he needed to do, then he was going after her.

  He’d come home with a sick feeling of dread in his stomach. Not because he even entertained the idea that she would leave him. He looked at his life, his work as if he was at war. Against time, against the forces of nature and the forces of mankind. He was a soldier, and their marriage was like any other military marriage. One where he would need to be deployed from time to time.

  So the feeling of dread he’d felt coming home was knowing he would have to tell her that he was turning around and heading out in a few weeks. The financing for yet another extension had come through.

  He’d expected more shouting, more fighting. He’d thought he could power through all of that with some mind-blowing sex that would remind her of what they had. How incendiary they could be.

  He’d thought wrong.

  It didn’t matter. Max stared at the brown envelope with his name on it, then dumped it in the trash, unopened.


  He would fix this. He would head out to sea for just a few more weeks, finish what he needed to finish, then he would go find her. Because there was no world he could live in where they weren’t together.

  Nor was angry. She was hurt. He knew that. But he also knew he could fix both those things. One more trip, then they could move forward with their life together.

  Three months later

  “SELENA?” ELEANOR CALLED to her assistant. Selena had been the first official employee of Head to Toe, Eleanor’s start-up company. “The red or burgundy?”

  Eleanor held the ties against the mannequin’s neck.

  Selena assessed the outfit, then nodded. “The red.”

  “I agree.”

  The two were working in the space Eleanor had recently rented. It was an open loft area in downtown Denver that would be perfect as they continued to expand. Running Head to Toe out of her apartment just wasn’t practical anymore.

  The business was a simple concept directed at busy single men. Head to Toe put together a complete outfit that would fit whatever need those men had. An outfit composed by women who knew what they were doing.

  Don’t have a woman in your life who can tell you what tie to wear? What color looks best on you? That, no, that belt and those shoes don’t match. Try Head to Toe!

  It had been the banner that ran along the top of the website, and, with the help of some targeted Facebook ads, orders had started to pour in. Business casual, formal, club scene and even the local bar look. They told Eleanor what they liked to wear, how they wanted to look, and Eleanor put together the perfect outfit for them. As the orders continued to come, she spent more time focusing on advertising. Now her market research was generating real results.

  So much that, beyond the warehouse people she’d hired to handle shipping and Selena—whom she had hired a few months ago to help keep up with orders—Eleanor was now looking to expand further with a dedicated client service support team.

  Which meant filling the loft with office furniture and computers.

  A sign on the door.

  Actually, she needed the door first.

  It had become what felt like a 24/7 effort on her part, but she didn’t mind the work. Watching something grow under her efforts was one of the most satisfying things she’d ever done.