Love Her or Lose Her (Hot & Hammered #2) - Tessa Bailey Page 0,99

really believed in her dream.

Rosie continued to the bedroom and dropped the stack of laundry on the bed, plopping down beside it and sighing at the clock. An hour until Dominic got home from work. He would be dusty and grimy. Which of course meant she’d be forced to strip him naked in the bathroom and bathe the poor man. Such was her lot in life.

She squealed inwardly and glanced down at her new engagement ring for the thousandth time that hour. There would be no recovering from that proposal. Days later and she still risked floating to the moon every time she thought about it. How lucky was she? Most people didn’t find their soul mates during their lifetime. She’d found Dominic twice.

The kitchen timer went off, and Rosie went to check her Chipa. She’d been experimenting with several recipes in the last few days, determined to nail down a short, tasteful menu, and Dominic was not complaining. He’d been going to the gym every morning to work off the food she fed him at night. When she’d scratched Dominic’s inked abs and mentioned she would love him even if his stomach wasn’t made of corrugated steel, he’d scoffed.

“Told you, honey girl,” he’d drawled, pushing her down onto the couch and unzipping his pants, dragging his tongue across his lower lip. “Not going soft when I’ve got a ten at home.”

An hour later, she’d had to apply Neosporin to the scratches on his back. He’d done the same to the rug burns on her knees.

They had a unique marriage.

“Wouldn’t trade it,” she murmured, taking her Chipa out of the oven, coaxing them from the pan, and setting the cheese-flavored rolls on the cooling rack. She took a knife from the drawer and carved off a small piece of one roll, popping it into her mouth—and threw her hands up in victory. They were perfect.

Having mastered one of her menu items, Rosie got the sudden urge to look at the restaurant blueprint. Just to remind herself this was happening. It was real.

Dominic had left the big rolled-up plan on top of the kitchen cabinet, and she retrieved it now with the help of a step stool. After moving the napkin rack and some bills out of the way, she unrolled the blueprint—and stopped.

“What’s this?” Rosie murmured, running a finger over the slope of a roof. It looked more like the blueprint for a house. That theory was bolstered by the typed address at the bottom of the page. It was located in Port Jefferson. Instead of taking the restaurant blueprint from Stephen’s office, they must have grabbed the plan for one of his flips.

Rosie was getting ready to roll the paper back up when she caught Dominic’s name at the very bottom, alongside her own. Homeowners.

She double-checked the address, positive she’d never been there.

What was this?

A weird shift happened under her feet. As if she’d been speeding along on a moving walkway at the airport and then stepped right in molasses. For over a week, everything had moved forward at such a rapid pace. Maybe she’d been in desperate need of some easy happiness. Some positivity. Because she hadn’t really stopped to think of the how.

How could she own a restaurant?

How could Dominic replace the stones in her mother’s ring?

The building materials seemed expensive, but she’d assumed they were left over from a flip. Or . . . donated.

Rosie swallowed the growing lump in her throat. She memorized the address on the blueprint and walked like a zombie to her car. Maybe the dread tickling her gut was unfounded, but something told her to go see the house. So she tugged the car keys out of her purse, got in her Honda, and drove . . .

Chapter Twenty-Four

When Dominic arrived home and Rosie’s car wasn’t in the driveway, he battled his disappointment. She’d probably gone down to the restaurant to check the progress, and he needed to get used to coming home from work and not finding her there. It wasn’t the first time since she’d moved back in that he’d returned to an empty house. And while he always counted the minutes until she darkened the doorway, Dominic found it wasn’t as hard as he thought to wait for his wife. Whenever he got the urge to get back in his truck, drive into town, and fireman-carry her home, he remembered her face when she’d become the owner of her own restaurant. He thought of the light that danced