What I Love About You Read Free Page B

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