Love Her or Lose Her (Hot & Hammered #2)(9)

But as Dominic split a look between Travis and Stephen, he recalled the times they’d come close to losing their women. They’d gotten them back, hadn’t they? If there was anything in this world worth fighting for, it was his wife.

Fuck. Most of all, he just needed to look at her. Be around her. His world was off-kilter, his mental equilibrium shot to hell. So that’s what he would do. He’d go remind her that marriage was forever and he’d ask her to come home. If there was even the slightest chance it might work, he had to take it.

Dominic swallowed hard. “What time is the meeting?”





Chapter Four


Rosie took a pizza cutter out of Bethany’s cutlery drawer and laid it beside the bowl of chilled dough, squaring her shoulders and preparing to create. Some might find her process crazy, but unless she really took a moment to focus on the food, she could taste her worries within the fabric of flavors. And that was a waste of good ingredients—an egregious sin.

When she arrived at Bethany’s house last night, her friend had answered the door with a sleep mask pushed up on her forehead, blond hair sticking out in eighty directions. She’d taken one look at Rosie’s face and wordlessly led her to the upstairs guest room. No words had been exchanged, just a long hug—and that was enough to let Rosie know her friends had seen the implosion of her marriage coming a mile away.

She didn’t know whether to be grateful or offended.

Good thing she didn’t really have the mental energy for either.

Making good food? She always had energy for that.

When she’d woken up this morning, Bethany had already left for work, but thankfully she’d left a house key sitting on the kitchen counter. Since Rosie had worked the early shift at Haskel’s, she’d gotten home first, and being alone in the big, airy house had given her too much room to think about Dominic shouting her name from the garage. To combat the sound of his voice, which continued to echo in her head, she’d gone to the market and then worked out some angst making dough for her mother’s medialunas.

Focus on the food.

Using the pizza wheel, she cut the dough in half and made two long rectangles. She stacked one rectangle of dough on top of the other and lined up the edges, cutting the dough into triangles, humming as she made strategic slits and molded them into crescent shapes, placing them one by one on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet. Then she set them on the windowsill to rise in the sunshine, the same way her mother used to do.

There, her mom would say. Now we sit, have a coffee, and savor our hard work.

God, she missed that woman. She’d had a tried-and-true method for everything. On Sundays, we wash and set our hair. Mondays are for cleaning and going through the mail. On Thursday evenings, we make asado—enough to get us through the weekend and share with the neighbors if they drop by. And all the while, Rosie’s father would smile indulgently, his fingers flipping through a car magazine or twisting a tool into a car part. It didn’t seem fair that people who’d been so rooted to this earth with their routines could just be gone. A stroke for her mother, and weeks later, her grieving father simply didn’t wake up one morning. So fast and jarring, but Rosie took comfort now in the knowledge they were together again.

The front door of the house opened and Bethany walked in, a camel-colored leather briefcase tucked smartly beneath one arm. “Why, honey. You cooked.”

“I’m making breakfast, actually,” Rosie said, gently poking one of her medialunas in the side to check the texture. “These will taste great in the morning with your coffee.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Bethany murmured, hopping up on one of the stools surrounding the marble island. “How was your day?”

Rosie rolled a shoulder and went to preheat the oven, setting it at 395—an important component of her mother’s crescent rolls. Don’t pressure the dough to grow up too fast, Rosie. “It was good. I even managed to sell a bottle of Le Squirt Bon Bon. As a joke, obviously, but it still counts in the eyes of the commission gods. What about yours?”

“Fine.” Brow furrowed, Bethany plucked at the arm of her blouse. “Making things pretty as usual. You know the drill.”

“Still wanting to ditch your swatch samples and swing that sledgehammer?”

“Like a motherfucker.” Bethany gave her a tight smile. “I’d rather talk about you, though. How are you doing?”

Again, she thought of Dominic and how panicked he’d looked when she started to pack. “I don’t feel great. I probably won’t for a long time, but . . . leaving was the right thing to do, Bethany. We’re married and we don’t even speak to each other.”

Bethany shook her head slowly. “You used to, though, right? In high school, the two of you always had your heads together, whispering about something.”

“We used to talk constantly, yeah. Where we would travel when we made some money. We’d talk about our dream home on the water. All the parties we would host in our big backyard.” Swallowing hard, Rosie took a bowl out of the cabinet and cracked an egg inside, beating it with a dollop of milk, preparing to make the egg wash to brush over the medialunas. “When he came back from overseas, I don’t think I noticed right away how quiet he’d become. I had my mother. We were always in the kitchen together and . . . he’d been gone so long, his silence didn’t register—I was just so happy to have him home safe. And then she was gone and it was so quiet. All the time.”