What I Love About You (2 page)

“No. I can stay.”

“You’ve been here long enough now. Your mother is probably wondering where you are.”

“My mom won’t mind.” She stomped the ground with one sandaled foot, then took off. She ran in a big circle around Blake. She actually galloped around and around. And God help him, with her head bobbing and her ponytail flying behind her, she kind of resembled a little pony.

Around and around she ran, stopping a few times to paw at the air and neigh. “Hey kid,” he called to her, but she just tossed her head and kept going. The pull of Johnnie rode him hard and irritation broke out across his skin. He had better things to do than stand there as a weird little girl acted like a horse. Better things, like go for a jog or swim or poke himself in the eye with a stick. “Time to go home.” She pretended not to hear him. What did she call herself? “Stop, Bow Tie!”

“Say whoa, girl,” she managed between rapid breaths.

He didn’t take orders from children. He was an adult. He wanted to tear out his hair. Christ almighty. “Shit.”

Around she ran, her pale cheeks turning pink. “That was a bad word.”

Blake frowned. “Whoa, girl.”

She finally stopped directly in front of him and blew out a breath. “I went weally fast.”

“You need to run home.”

“That’s okay. I can play for . . .” She paused before adding, “Five moe minutes.”

He’d lived in a dirt hole and crawled through swamps. He’d eaten bugs and pissed in Gatorade bottles. For twenty years, his life had consisted of hard, rough edges. When he’d retired from the teams, he’d had to make a deliberate effort to keep the F-word out of every sentence and his hand off his nuts. He’d had to remember that in civilian life, creative swearing wasn’t a competitive sport and that ball scratching wasn’t a public event. He had to remember the manners his mother had pounded into his and Beau’s heads. Nice, polite behavior toward everyone from little kids to little old ladies. Today he wanted this kid gone before he ripped his skin off, and he chose not to remember those nice manners. He purposely narrowed his eyes and gave the kid the hard steel gaze that he’d used to make terrorists cower.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?”

She didn’t seem at all afraid. She was definitely a little slow in the head. Another time he might have taken that into consideration. “Get your ass in your own yard.”

She gasped. “You said a bad word.”

“Go home, little girl.”

She pointed at the cat on the front of her T-shirt. “I’m a big girl!”

Another day, another time, he might have admired the kid’s guts. He leaned forward and towered over her like his father used to do to him and Beau. “I
shit
bigger than you,” he said, just like his old man.

The kid sucked in a scandalized breath but wasn’t intimidated at all. She wasn’t shaking in her little shoes. Was there something wrong with the kid, besides her thinking she was a horse, or was he losing his touch?

“Charlotte?”

Blake and the kid spun toward the sound of a woman’s voice. She stood a few feet away, wearing a little yellow T-shirt and those shorts he’d had the privilege of seeing from behind. The shadow of a big straw hat hid her face and rested just above the bow of her full lips. Pretty mouth, nice legs, great ass. Probably something wrong with her eyes.

“Mama!” The kid ran to her mother and threw herself on the woman’s waist.

“You know you aren’t supposed to leave the yard, Charlotte Elizabeth.” The shade of her hat slid down her throat and T-shirt to her breasts as she looked down at her child. “You’re in big trouble.”

Nice-size breasts, smooth curve in her waist. Yeah, probably had funky eyes.

“That man is weally mean,” the kid wailed. “He said bad words at me.”

The sudden sobbing was so suspect he might have laughed if he was in a laughing mood. Behind him, Johnnie whispered his name, and in front, the shade of a straw hat rested on the top of a nice pair of breasts. The shadow dipped into her smooth cleavage, and lust plunged straight down Blake’s pants. He went from irritation to desire to a combination of both in the blink of an eye.

The brim of the hat rose to the bow of her lip again. “I heard him.” The corners of her mouth dipped in a disapproving frown.

His frown matched hers. He’d always avoided women like her. Women with children. Women with children were looking for daddies, and he’d never wanted kids. His or anyone else’s.

“Please don’t swear at my child.”

“Please keep your child out of my yard.” Women with children wanted men who wanted relationships. He wasn’t a relationship kind of guy. Out of all the SEAL teams, Team Six had the highest divorce rate for a reason. It was filled with men who loved to throw themselves out of airplanes and get shot out of torpedo tubes. Filled with good men who weren’t any good at relationships. Men like him, and until recently, like his brother. Men like his father, whose wives divorced them after twenty years of serial cheating.

“Fine.” Her lips pursed like she was going to hit him or kiss him. Off the top of his head, he’d guess the former. “But what kind of man talks like that to a child?”

The kind who was white-knuckling his sixty-second day of sobriety. The kind who wanted to pour some Johnnie down his throat, say fuck it, and dive face-first into soft cleavage. “What kind of mother lets her child roam around unsupervised?”

She gasped. “She was supervised.”

“Uh-huh.” He’d made her mad. Good. Now maybe she’d leave. Leave him to his fight with Johnnie and himself.

“Charlotte knows better than to leave our yard.”

He pointed out the obvious. “This isn’t your yard.”

“She’s never run off before.”

He couldn’t see her eyes, but he could feel her angry gaze. All hot and fiery. He liked hot and fiery. He liked it riding him like a banshee. Wild, screaming his name, and . . . Christ. His lust for Johnnie and this nameless woman made him dizzy. “Only takes once for her to get hit by a truck,” he heard himself say between clenched teeth. “I had a dog that only got out once. Bucky ended up as axle grease for a Chevy Silverado.” He shook his head. God, he’d loved that poodle. “He’d been a damn good dog, too.”

Her pink mouth opened and closed like she was speechless. Then she waved a hand at the bottle of Johnnie and obviously found her voice. “Are you drunk?”

“No. Haven’t had a drop.” He wished he could blame his erection on Johnnie.

“Then you don’t have an excuse. You’re just a . . . a . . .” She paused to cover the girl’s ears with her palms. “A raging asshole.”

She’d get no argument from him.

“I heard that,” the kid said into her mother’s stomach.

“Come on, Charlotte.” She grabbed the kid’s hand and stormed off. He could practically see the steam shooting out of her ears.

So much for being the charming twin.

He shrugged, and his gaze fell to her nice butt.

Fuck it. Charming was for nice guys, and he hadn’t felt nice for a very long time.

Chapter Two

Natalie Cooper had been raised to believe that a woman was more than a pretty face. More than good hair and a flair for picking out shoes. Her mother and grandmother had preached the need for a good head beneath that hair and the importance of having her feet planted in reality. Above all, the two divorced women had pounded the pulpit about the importance of a woman having her own money. Too make it and stash it for when that no-good bastard of a husband ran off with a younger version.

Too bad Natalie hadn’t listened. She’d loved glitter crowns and pink boas. Her hair rolled on big curlers for bounce and body, and her feet in high heels or jeweled sandals. She’d loved everything girly, but most of all, she’d loved Michael Cooper.

He and his family had moved to Truly when he’d been in the sixth grade, and he’d sat at the desk in front of her. She’d loved the cut of his dark hair across the back of his neck and his shoulders in his plaid shirts. He was the cutest boy she’d ever seen, and his dark brown eyes had melted her young heart.

If he noticed, he never let on until the tenth grade when he finally asked her out. He’d taken her to see
Titanic
, and she’d paid more attention to his arm next to hers than to the sinking ship. They spent the next day together and most every day after. He’d been the quarterback of the football team and she the head cheerleader. They’d been on the student council, heads of the debate team, and members of every royal court from tenth to twelfth grade. The coup de grâce came the winter of their senior year when they’d been chosen king and queen of the Truly Winter Festival.

The festival drew tourists from as far as five states away and was famous for such contests as tube racing, snowmobile jumping, ice sculpting, and the Truly Bachelor Auction.

Every year, a parade down Main Street kicked off the festival, and Natalie and Michael had sat atop their snowy thrones, waving to the crowd. She’d worn a white fur cape over a royal-blue velvet gown that perfectly matched her eyes. A big rhinestone crown sat within a mass of blond curls on her head. Michael had worn white, too, looking like a dark-haired Prince Charming.

After graduation that spring, she and Michael had married against her mother and grandmother’s wishes. They’d had a beautiful ceremony in his parents’ backyard, overlooking Angel Beach and Lake Mary.

She’d followed him to Boise and worked at a camera store in the mall to put him through Boise State University. They’d lived in a tiny student apartment and driven an old Volkswagen. There’d never been much money, but Natalie had never minded. She’d been raised by two women on limited incomes and was used to making her own fun and making do, but it had bothered Michael.

He didn’t like “making do” and had always promised that after he got his business degree, he’d work and put her through school. It took him six years to get his master’s of finance degree, and by that time, Natalie was no longer interested in school.

Michael got a job at Langtree Capital, and he started out managing individual 401(k)s and smaller stock portfolios. Friends of his parents invested with their small-town-boy-done-good, and Michael quickly rose to higher-profile clients.

As Michael made more money, they bought a house and new cars and went on fabulous vacations. She loved her husband and he loved her. They had a nice home and great friends and a bright future. They had a wonderful life, but the one thing they didn’t have was a family. They’d been married for seven years, together for nine. Natalie wanted children.

On the ninth anniversary of their first date to see
Titanic
, Natalie stopped taking her birth control pills. She expected to get pregnant immediately. When that didn’t happen right away, she wasn’t worried. She and Michael were young and healthy, but after a year and half of trying, she was referred to an infertility specialist. To her utter shock and dismay, she discovered that she had a hormone imbalance that kept her from ovulating. Other than light periods, she’d never had symptoms that anything was wrong.

For the next several years, she made it her mission to conceive. She took clomiphene, then graduated to Repronex. She took her temperature and ovulation tests, and Michael did his part. Always up for the task, so to speak, and every month that it didn’t happen, she fell in to a dark funk that lasted several days.

Then, on Michael’s twenty-eighth birthday, she took him to dinner at his favorite restaurant and surprised him with the news that she was six weeks’ pregnant.

“I took four tests,” she said, all wrapped up in the thrill and excitement and rattling on about baby names and nursery colors. It was really going to happen. Their dream was finally coming true, and it took her several moments to realize Michael hadn’t said a word. He drank his Maker’s Mark and flipped through messages on his BlackBerry.

“Is something wrong?”

He pressed a few more buttons on the phone and sipped his bourbon. “I didn’t think it would happen.”

“Me either!” She reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “I’d almost given up hope.”

He looked up. “I’m happy for you.”

Her heart paused and she slid her hand to her lap. “Don’t you mean us?”

He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach the brown eyes she’d loved for so many years. “Of course.” She tried to tell herself that Michael didn’t always show his feelings. Not like her. During the infertility roller coaster of the past few years, she’d been an emotional Ping-Pong ball and he’d been her rock. It was one of the things she loved about him.

That night they made love to each other for no other reason than that they were two people in love. Not because a pee stick indicated ovulation.

The next morning when she woke, Michael had already left for work, and she lounged around the house in a euphoric bubble. Her life was perfect, a warm, soft haven of two people in love and the miracle they’d created.

She stood in the middle of the guest bedroom closest to the master, envisioning all the different ideas she had for a nursery, lambs and bunnies, or perhaps Winnie-the-Pooh. She called her mother and grandmother and Michael’s parents. They’d all waited so long for the happy news and were as excited as Natalie. While she busied herself with laundry, she called her best friend since first grade, Delilah. Lilah didn’t have children, claimed she never wanted any, but had been waiting for Natalie to make her a godmother.

“If it’s a girl, I want to name her Charlotte after my great-grandmother.”

“You always said you wanted to name your little girl Jerrica.”

Natalie had laughed, not at all surprised that her friend remembered the old cartoon. “From Jem and the Holograms? We were ten.” The doorbell rang as she set the laundry basket on the couch. She got off the phone and opened the door to stare into the dark glasses and badges of the Boise Police Department. They were looking for Michael, and her first thought was that something horrible had happened to her husband. That he’d been in an accident. But they had a warrant and searched her house. They asked her questions about money and Michael and accused her husband, the man she’d known for most of her life, the boy who’d sat in front of her in sixth grade, of embezzlement. Of underreporting profits and skimming money. They wanted to know about a trip she’d taken with Michael to the Cayman Islands. She told them about white sand and pale blue water. Turtles and iguanas and scuba diving. But they wanted to know about accounts in Cayman National Securities.

She tried to call Michael, so he could clear up the misunderstanding, but his phone was shut off. She couldn’t get ahold of him that day or the next. She was interviewed and reinterviewed. She was interrogated and passed a lie detector test. Michael’s disappearance made local then national news, with his picture and hers splashed across the television. A cameraman caught her walking into her doctor’s appointment, her face pale while dark circles shadowed her eyes. She looked ready to jump out of her skin, exhausted and on edge and so terrified her husband was dead somewhere, and all anyone could talk about was money he’d supposedly embezzled.

Michael wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t steal people’s money. Two of those people happened to be his own parents, and he would never leave Natalie to face it all alone. That wasn’t Michael, but the only other souls on the planet who seemed to agree with her were his parents.

Ron and Carla Cooper came to stay with her that first week and the second. In the past, Natalie and Carla had butted heads sometimes. Carla Cooper was a woman who wanted things a certain way, and the older Natalie got, the more she resisted Carla’s “suggestions.” But in believing in Michael’s innocence, they were united.

Natalie’s mother and grandmother came down to Boise the third week, but Natalie did little but stand in her and Michael’s closet, touching his clothes and smelling his old BSU hoodie. At night, she wore one of his T-shirts and slept on his pillow.

The government seized all banking and investment accounts. It wasn’t until she learned from them that the accounts had been emptied the day before Michael’s disappearance that she got the first pang of apprehension. As soon as she felt the twinge in the pit of her stomach, she dismissed it. She was exhausted and confused and scared. Michael had been missing for over two weeks now and her life had become one hellacious moment after another. She feared for him, and she feared that the stress would harm the tiny baby she’d fought to conceive.

For a solid month, she and Michael’s parents heard nothing. Tortured by the silence and what-ifs, until the morning she sat at the kitchen table, trying to keep down a slice of toast. The lawyer the Coopers had hired called to inform her that Michael had been found in an El Paso hotel. Very much alive. For two beats her heart swelled in her chest. Michael was alive.

In the next two heartbeats her chest caved. Her whole life fell apart as the breaking news continued. He’d been found with several fake passports and driver’s licenses. All under assumed names. How did a person even get one fake passport, let alone three? Worse, at least for her, he also had a twenty-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany.

Natalie would not have believed it if she hadn’t seen him on the national news, cuffed and doing the perp walk into the El Paso County Jail, his dark hair longer than usual and a dark beard and mustache covering the lower half of his face. Over and over she watched her handsome husband, head down, as he hurried past the cameras.

She found out over the next few days and weeks that he and Tiffany were waiting to slip into Mexico and then head for Switzerland. He’d planned it all out. The theft. The bank accounts. The new identities. The new twenty-year-old version of Natalie. He’d planned all that and she’d never known.

Years later, she could still recall that day he’d been apprehended. She recalled the half-eaten toast in her hand. The images on the television screen and the floor rushing up toward her. Sitting for hours and watching the news footage, chewing up her heart and spitting it out and unable to look away.

The summer after she and Michael got married, they’d left Truly. The football star and the cheerleader—off to live a golden life. The town had practically thrown a parade at their parting.

Ten years later, Natalie returned home alone and pregnant, her soon-to-be-former husband facing seven years in a federal prison. The government took everything. Her house. Her car. Her jewelry. Her life. She returned heartbroken, humiliated, and penniless. She had nothing but a suitcase in one hand and a camera in the other. In her head she had a whole notebook of questions.

Questions like when had her life gone so wrong? Had she been so wrapped up in creating a miracle baby that she hadn’t noticed the changes in her husband? Had the changes started with little things? Like his preference for bourbon rather than beer. When had the small-town boy turned into a man who would steal from corporations and old people without discrimination or conscience? When had he become a liar and a cheater? When had he stopped loving her?

The answers came in a phone call a year after Michael had been sentenced. It had been the first time she’d heard his voice since the trial.

“You’re boring,” he’d said.

At the time, those two words had crushed her. Now at the age of thirty-three she was older and wiser and wished for some boredom in her life. She was a single mother of her miracle child. The owner of Glamour Snaps and Prints, a photography studio and digital photo print shop. Her life was very busy. Her life was good, but late at night, when the house was quiet and Charlotte was in bed, she sometimes wondered if she’d ever really known Michael at all.

“I told her she was too mature for the smoky eye.”

Natalie placed her elbows on the front counter and her face in her hands. She frowned at the prints of eighty-year-old Mabel Vaughn. “She looks like someone punched her,” she told her best friend, Lilah Markham. The two women stood in Glamour Snaps and Prints, located on Main and Second streets, wearing identical scowls, but that was where any similarities ended. Natalie was five-feet-seven. Lilah, five-one. Natalie wore black pants and ballet flats and a white blouse with the name of her business embroidered on the breast pocket. Her blond ponytail was held at the back of her head with a simple black band. She wore mascara and coral lip gloss, and a single silver ring circled the middle finger of her right hand.

Currently, Lilah wore a short leather dress and leather boots with five-inch heels. Perfectly applied gray and purple shadowed her brown eyes. Her red hair was buzzed on the sides and she had white spiky bangs. Anyone else might run the risk of looking ridiculous, but only someone with Lilah’s style could pull off the dominatrix-iguana look in conservative Truly.

“She kept shaking her bony finger and yelling, ‘More smoky eye.’ ” Lilah was a talented cosmetologist who worked at the Cutting Edge salon across the street and moonlighted as a makeup artist. When Natalie booked a glamour shot, she always sent the customer to Lilah first. Not only because Lilah was her best friend, but because Lilah had worked for several Hollywood stylists with long lists of celebrity clients. She’d worked in Los Angeles for the rich and famous for over ten years, and if not for an unfortunate incident involving a starlet, a strapless Alexander McQueen gown, and a pair of scissors, Lilah would no doubt still be in Hollywood with her own celebrity list. “She wouldn’t listen to me,” Lilah added.