Summer Beach Reads 5-Book Bundle: Beachcombers, Heat Wave, Moon Shell Beach, Summer House, Summer Breeze Read Free

suits and four-inch heels and kept her blond hair cut short, chic, and easy to care for. She did less creative work and spent more of her time dealing with clients, executives, lawyers, techies, and accountants. At night she and Gerry often worked late, or took clients out to dinner. She felt glamorous, accomplished, successful. She was having fun, making money, and looking fabulous.
    In the meantime, sexpot Dara got married, twice. Marina was Dara’s maid of honor the first time. The second time, Dara flew off with her wealthy lover to Pago Pago for their wedding and extended honeymoon. Dara’s second husband owned a megabucks Kansas City real estate company. When he signed on with Warren Design & Advertising, his business and his contacts sent Marina and Gerry’s company skyrocketing into the economic stratosphere.
    Marina was grateful to Dara for this. Their friendship took on a new energy. Marina and Dara attended the same parties, went on shopping sprees together, and gossiped over lunch at posh restaurants. Dara was obsessed with her appearance—she got breast implants when she was thirty, and a face-lift at thirty-two—but Marina understood. After all, she was in the ad business. She appreciated the importance of presentation.
    Over the years, Dara lost interest in their domesticated friend, but every few months Marina made time to visit Christie. In the midst of her pack of children, dogs, and cats, Christie was a calm, contented center, moving slowly, in no rush to finish any project and be somewhere else. She was right where she wanted to be. Marina admired the pace, the depth, the comfort of Christie’s life.Marina felt like she was always straining, rushing, pushing, to get somewhere else.
    And as the years passed and Marina grew older, she discovered that she was beginning to envy Christie, too.
    One sultry July afternoon, she confessed a deep and powerful secret to Christie. She told Christie before she told Dara. She told Christie even before she told Gerry. The words felt so odd in her mouth.
    “Christie, I want a baby. Actually, I’ve gotten kind of obsessed with it. I don’t want five kids like you have, I couldn’t do that. But I do want a child of my own.”
    “Well, honey,” Christie replied, laughing, “that’s one thing you can get without wearing those killer tight suits.”
    Christie gave her the courage to confide in Gerry. He seemed amused, but he liked the idea. So in the middle of the hurricane that was their life, Marina and Gerry tried to make a baby.
    But the baby wouldn’t come.
    They were both shocked. Their history together was one of achievement and success, not failure.
    They tried everything. Tests. Charts. Positions. Herbal and hormonal supplements. Nothing worked. They saw several doctors, who all pronounced Marina and Gerry healthy and perfectly capable of reproduction. Yet still nothing happened.
    She confided in Dara, and Dara said, “Oh, honey, consider it a blessing. A baby would ruin your figure.”
    Marina couldn’t understand it. She tried to be relaxed about it all, but when she saw another woman with a baby, she burned with envy. She dreamed of babies at night and longed for one every waking hour. As each month passed in failure and sorrow, she began to hate herself.
    One afternoon she sat in her slick chrome-and-glass office, staring at her computer screen, thinking over and over again in a relentless circle of pain: Why couldn’t she get pregnant, what was wrong with her? She felt something wet on her hand. It wouldn’t be tears. She didn’t allow herself to cry in the office. She glanced down to discover that she had been stabbing the palm of her hand with the tip of her silver letter opener. She gasped and tossed the letter opener onto the desk. She pressed tissues against her hand, grabbedup her purse, and raced from her office. She didn’t even stop to tell her assistant where she was going. She didn’t even know where she was going—she just needed