Read The Ocean Between Us for Free Online Page A

all she thought about, consuming her like a giddy fever that kept her in its relentless grip. She hadn’t given him an answer to his proposal. The issue was not nearly as simple as she wished it could be.
    He was not a man to settle for half measures. He wanted everything from her. She wasn’t sure she could live with his intensity, with his rocket-powered ambition. She didn’t know if his dreams could somehow mesh with her own.
    In the wake of unbearable grief, she had fashioned a life for herself here. A small and tidy existence she happened to like very much. She had none of Josh’s scenery-eating hunger for adventure, for everything. She wondered why that was—because shecouldn’t handle having her dreams come true, or because she was leery of wanting something too much? She couldn’t decide what scared her more, marrying Josh or losing him forever.
    He was everything she wasn’t supposed to want, a Navy man who spent half his life at sea and the other half moving like a gypsy from place to place. He was a heartache waiting to happen.
    The cheerful brrring of a bicycle bell sounded. She looked down the street to see Patricia Rivera peddling toward her. She was exactly what people meant when they said pregnant women bloomed. Patricia’s cheeks were flushed the color of a rose. Her slick dark hair shone. Her legs were ropy with muscle as she glided to the end of the driveway and squeezed the hand brakes. Even the bruise-colored starburst of varicose veins behind her knee looked as though it belonged there, every bit as appropriate as her protruding stomach.
    Lauren held the plastic-wrapped paper away from her to let it drip on the ground. “You’re looking chipper this morning.”
    Patricia smiled and smoothed a hand down her belly, draped in a polyester top that screamed Wal-Mart but only managed to play up her fragile beauty. “I have news.”
    “Let me guess. You’re pregnant.” Lauren spoke lightly, but deep in a hidden place inside her, a terrible envy howled.
    “Very funny.” Patricia opened the top of her water bottle and took a swig. “Congratulate me. It’s a boy. He was finally turned in the right direction during the ultrasound.”
    The knife twisted. Still, Lauren found a smile of genuine happiness for her friend. “Congratulations, Patricia. That’s great.”
    “Thanks.” Patricia put her water away. “The doctor says I can keep coming to fitness class so long as I take it slow. No restrictions other than common sense.”
    Lauren congratulated her again and watched her friend ride away. Patricia had a husband she adored and a baby on the way. She looked like Catherine Zeta-Jones, but she was impossible to dislike. She was kind and bright, and she’d been one of Lauren’s favorite people since the day she’d walked into the fitness studiolast fall. And she was not without her sadnesses, either. Her husband was half a world away on the same carrier as Josh, and she was bursting with the news about their baby.
    Lauren looked down, startled to see that she held both hands lovingly on her stomach. She shook her head and went back inside. The phone rang as soon as she stepped into the kitchen.
    She glanced at the clock over the stove. It was the middle of the night in Josh’s part of the world. She picked up on the fourth ring.
    “Mrs. Stanton?” A vaguely familiar female voice used her married name, which she heard so seldom that the sound of it startled her.
    “That’s me.”
    “I have Dr. Hendler on the line for you.”
    The receiver in her hand was suddenly drenched in sweat. It nearly slipped from her grasp. This was the call she had been awaiting with terrifying hope and dread.
    She was aware of everything around her with razor-edged clarity: the pink-toothed profile of the mountains against the morning sky; the perfect flight of wheeling gulls patrolling the beach; the sound of radio music drifting from the bedroom.
    “Yes?” she asked in a strange and distant voice she