Page 84 of Have To Be Mine

“What happens after the runway show? When we go back to New York?”

His eyes traveled over my face like he was memorizing every detail or trying to decide where to start devouring first. Pure desire was written all over his face. I’d never seen that before. Never had a man look at me like I was both fragile and strong and worthy of being worshiped.

It was jarring. And freeing.

For the first time in over a decade, I felt like I could be myself. Not the hardened military officer. Not the logistics expert who had to be tougher than everyone else in the room to be taken seriously. Just me. The woman I’d buried when my mother died.

“I’d like to keep seeing you,” Dash said, his thumb tracing circles on my hip. “If you want to, of course.”

Oh, good God. I would walk across broken glass with no shoes if he used that deep voice while touching me.

“Maybe you can find a role with me in logistics,” he continued. “We make a pretty killer team.”

I smiled despite the anxiety creeping in. “I don’t date colleagues.”

He shrugged, that infuriating smirk playing at his lips. “Then maybe we should make sure we don’t date for too long.”

I stared at him. “What does that mean?”

He grinned. Was that a promise of a future or a fiery end? With him, it really could go either way.

What if the version of me he’d fallen for, the one who wore dresses and sang under the stars, wasn’t the real me at all? What if that woman was just a vacation fantasy, and the real me was the one who wore cargo pants and kept her hair in a severe bun and didn’t know how to relax?

I’d spent years building those defenses. The military identity that kept me close to my father as we navigated the loss of my mother together. The discipline and structure that helped me heal. All my friends were in that world. That was my life. I was a civilian, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to be the typical woman.

What if Dash only wanted this Greek vacation version of me? Would he expect me to change to be the person I was here and not the real me? Which version was the real one? I didn’t even know anymore.

The thought hit me like a punch to the gut. How had I not paused sooner to realize the truth of this situation? Dash and I could never work. Because he didn’t actually know me.

He knew the woman who let her guard down for a week. He didn’t know the woman who woke up early every morning for a five-mile run. Who ate the same breakfast every day because routine was comforting. I didn’t have hobbies or close friends or any idea how to just exist without a mission to complete.

“Krista?” His voice pulled me back. “You okay?”

I looked at him and tried to find the words to explain I wasn’t the woman who crawled into a man’s lap. Thankfully, his phone rang and I didn’t have to.

I climbed off his lap. “Good luck,” I said with a tight smile.

“I’ll make this quick,” he replied. “And then I want you in my lap—preferably without clothes.”

27

DASH

The set was going to be perfect. I knew it the second I walked up to the highest point of the island that morning and stood there looking at what we’d built.

The runway extended across the hilltop. The staging crew had been here since four in the morning. They’d done something spectacular with the frames and the fabric and the lighting rigs that weren’t even powered on yet. White columns flanked the runway in pairs, draped with fabric that moved in the breeze. When the sun hit them at the right angle, which it would, this whole thing was going to look like the Parthenon in all its glory.

Ancient and new at the same time. Shimmery gold accents that screamed opulence. Decadent and elegant. It was going to be fucking fantastic. The history of it, the mythology baked into every stone. The new line was all about women owning their bodies like the Greek goddesses still worshiped today.

I walked the length of the runway twice, eyeballing the spacing between columns, checking that the angles matched what Sebastian had mapped out in the pre-production documents I’d finally read cover to cover three days ago. The lighting director came to find me around eight with questions about the color temperature for the sunset window and we spent forty minutes going through options until I could see exactly what I wanted.

The sun was going to set directly behind the runway. The models would walk into it. The light would be gold and warm and the fabric of the collection would catch it like fire.

It was going to be perfect. I could feel it in my chest. Usually, I did my thing and just kind of hoped for the best. But this time, I knew it was going to be spectacular. I was going to blow away my family, and then hopefully, they’d get off my ass.

This was going to be the best thing the Blackwell name had ever put on a runway. Better than our other shows that we all got to put our own spin on.

And I did it all because of her. I’d pulled this off because Krista Hedley had shown up and she had shaken me awake by the collar until I’d decided to actually show up. I turned to look for her.