Marie Ferrarella - Do You Take This Maverick?

“Didn’t see the harm?” Claire echoed incredulously. Her eyes narrowed into angry, accusing slits. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? Well, I’ll tell you what the harm is. The harm is that you just walked off and left me— again .” Not wanting to wake up anyone at the boarding house, she struggled to keep from shouting at him, but it wasn’t easy.

“Again? What again ?” he demanded, stunned. “Claire, what are you talking about? When did I leave you?”

Was he serious? He couldn’t possibly be as clueless as he was pretending to be, could he?

“When didn’t you leave me?” Claire countered, her anger all but running over like a boiling pot of water. “You’re always going off out of town to some sales meetings or other. And if it’s not a meeting, then it’s a seminar .” She said the word as if it was a lie that he fed her. “I never get to see you anymore,” she complained.

Levi felt his own temper surging, something that almost never happened. Ordinarily, he could put up with his wife’s fluctuating moods, but right now he felt as if he’d had more than he could stand.

“You’re seeing me now.” Levi spread his hands wide, as if to highlight his presence. “I’m standing right here,” he pointed out.

Was he mocking her? His attitude just kept fueling her anger. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean,” he told her, feeling more and more bewildered and put upon by the second. “I’m going to those sales meetings and seminars because my job demands it. I’m doing it for you and the baby,” Levi stressed.

But Claire saw it differently. “You’re doing it to get away from me and the baby.”

Levi blew out a long breath as he gave up. There was no reasoning with her. “You’re tired, you don’t know what you’re saying,” Levi concluded, feeling rather desperate. He just wanted this to stop.

Her big brown eyes—eyes he had fallen in love with the first time he saw her—were all but shooting daggers at him. “Oh, so now I’m just crazy?”

Where had that come from? “I didn’t say that,” Levi insisted.

She was twisting everything, he thought helplessly. He felt as if he had stepped into quicksand and was sinking fast, no matter how hard he tried to pull himself free.

“Maybe you didn’t say it but that’s what you implied,” Claire retorted haughtily. “And who could blame me if I was crazy—which I’m not ,” Claire underscored. “The only one I get to talk to all day is a colicky, crying baby. Don’t get me wrong, Levi, I love Bekka, but you’re never around.” It was an angry accusation, one she dared him to deny.

“Yes, I am,” Levi insisted. “I come home to you every night,” Levi told her.

“Sure, you come home,” she jeered. “You come home to fall into bed, dead asleep before your head hits the pillow.”

“I put in long hours, Claire, and I’m tired,” Levi tried to explain.

Claire’s back went up as she instantly took offense at what she thought he was implying. “Oh, and I don’t and I’m not?”

Levi threw up his hands, thoroughly frustrated. He had stayed longer at the game than he had intended and lost money, to boot. He hadn’t meant for any of that to happen. He wasn’t really sure why it had happened. But he knew that her anger was way out of proportion.

“Look, let’s not get into this now,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay—and you’re not sorry,” she told him angrily. “But I am. I’m sorry I ever met you. I’m sorry I ever married you!”

Levi was close to being speechless. “Claire, what are you saying?”

Heightened fury was all but etched into her fine features and had colored her cheeks to a bright shade of pink.

“What I’m saying is that it’s over,” she retorted furiously. “I made a mistake. We both made a mistake. We should have never gotten married in the first place.”

All this because he stayed out playing poker too long? He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Claire—”

“Get out!” she cried. Circling him, she put her hands on his back and started pushing him out the door into the hallway. “Get out now!”

“Claire—” It was all Levi could get out of his mouth. He was completely stunned and unable to even understand how they had gotten to this impasse so quickly.

“Now!” she yelled, managing to shove him out all the way only because she had caught him so completely off guard.

The second he was across the threshold and in the hall, Claire pulled off her wedding ring.

“Here, I don’t want this anymore, either!” she cried, throwing her wedding ring at him.

The next second she slammed the door shut behind him.

He heard the click and knew she’d flipped the lock. Claire had the only key.

Levi stood there in front of the door to their room for several moments, dazed and wondering if he was hallucinating all this for some reason. What had just happened seemed to have come out of nowhere.

This trip was supposed to have picked up Claire’s spirits. Instead, he felt that he had just witnessed his marriage falling apart.

What the hell had just happened here? Levi wondered. He hadn’t a clue.

As he walked away from the door, Levi heard Bekka beginning to wail from inside the room.

“You and me both, kid,” he murmured under his breath. “You and me both.”

Chapter One

Almost a month had gone by since the disastrous night of the wedding, and Levi still didn’t know exactly what had happened. What he did know was that he wanted his wife back.

He missed her.

Missed the baby.

Missed being a married man more than he had ever thought possible.

In one all-too-quick swoop his orderly world had fallen into a state of formless chaos, and he absolutely hated it. He felt directionless. When he and Claire had been together, his life had had purpose, he’d had goals. Now he was just blindly going from one end of the day to the other. He still showed up for work at the furniture store every morning, but he lacked his usual energy, feeling lost and so alone that he literally ached.

Without Claire, absolutely nothing seemed to make any sense to him anymore.

Initially, as he had walked back to his truck right after Claire had thrown him out, his own anger at what he felt was her uncalled-for reaction to his late arrival continued to grow—along with his confusion. Why had she blown a gasket? After all, he’d just been playing poker with some of the guys he’d met at the wedding, not playing around with some little flirt.

He knew lots of men who took any opportunity to cheat on their wives, claiming that marriage hemmed them in, and that they needed something besides the “same old piece of stale cake” to get their adrenaline flowing.

But he wasn’t like that. And he certainly didn’t feel that way about his marriage.

The moment that he had first laid eyes on Claire in that cute little sundress she’d been wearing the day they met, peering into the show window of the furniture store where he worked, he had fallen for her like the proverbial ton of bricks. He’d even taken the initiative and gone outside the store to tell her that the set she was looking at was on sale. It really wasn’t. He’d made that up just to have an excuse to talk to her.

Had she actually wanted to buy that set, he would have had to come up with the difference out of his own pocket, but he was so taken with her, he would have done it and gladly. The way he saw it, it would have been more than worth it to him.

From that day forward, Claire Strickland had always been the only girl for him. He’d loved her so much, he’d been willing to wait until she graduated from college before they got married. In fact, he’d insisted on it. First the degree, then the ring. Because it was best for her, and he didn’t want to be the reason she had dropped out of college. From the first moment he met her, it had always been about what was best for her. He felt that she brought out the best in him.