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Stephen helped her up, spun her into his arms and proceeded to take hold of her a good few inches south of where he was supposed to. Allegra clenched her teeth, prised his hand from her left buttock and moved it to her hip.
‘You’re no fun any more,’ Stephen moaned, not in the least bit repentant.
She placed one hand on his shoulder, the other on his cheek and got into position. ‘You and I have never had that kind of fun, Stephen, and nor are we likely to,’ she said, as she tipped her head to the correct angle.
Pity, that. Because Stephen was blond and finely sculpted, and just about the only man under fifty she saw on a regular basis who wasn’t gay. But Stephen had the morals of an alley cat, and made the most of being a good-looking straight male in a predominantly female profession. When it came to women, flirting was Stephen’s default position. However, as long as any physical contact between them was strictly professional, Stephen was pretty harmless. Most of the time she ignored it and they got along fine, but this afternoon she really needed to impress Damien and her partner was not making it easy.
‘I think there are a few of the corps that you haven’t slept with lurking in the corridors hoping to catch a glimpse of you. Why don’t you see if you can rid them of their girlish illusions once rehearsal’s over and leave me alone?’
‘Careful, darling,’ he said as he dipped her backwards and then lifted her into the air. ‘Or soon they’ll be calling you the Little Cactus instead of the Little Mermaid.’
The rehearsal went fine after that. At least, Allegra had thought it was going fine. She lost herself in the dancing, just as she’d done in the early days, and forgot about everything—the reviews, her father, even the telephone call that had made her heart soar, just for a moment. Instead she concentrated on bones and joints and muscles, on shapes and lines and angles. It was a blessed relief.
‘No, no, no!’ Damien shouted as they got to the end of a particularly difficult combination. The pianist who’d been accompanying them broke off mid-bar.
‘You’re supposed to be the picture of innocent longing, my dear,’ the choreographer said, turning away from her and running his hand through his hair. ‘Do try and put some feeling into it or the audience will be dropping off to sleep.’ He turned to the pianist. ‘From the top—again.’
So they did it again. And again.
Allegra looked deep inside herself, pulled out everything she could find in there—and there was quite a shopping list, she discovered. Grief for a lost parent and a lost childhood. Resentment for every person who’d pushed and pulled and ordered her around in the last decade. And, yes, longing too. Longing for a pair of deep brown eyes and a crinkly smile, for a life of adventure that could never be hers. She poured it all in there and when they’d finished that section she was drained.
She broke away from Stephen and headed for her water bottle on the floor near the mirrors, then she picked up her towel and wiped the sweat off her face, neck and shoulders.
She turned to find Damien surveying her with hard eyes.
‘I can see you’re trying, Allegra, but it’s not enough. I need more.’ He nodded to the pianist. ‘From the start of the adagio…’
Allegra walked over to Stephen, a slight twinge in her right ankle making her favour the other foot, and they assumed the starting position for their pas de deux. The pianist pounded the keys and Allegra closed her eyes, told her exhausted body it could do this and started to move.
After no more than ten bars of music Damien interrupted them. ‘More, Allegra! I need more!’ he yelled as she turned and jumped, spun and balanced.
‘More!’ he shouted as Stephen propelled her into the air, turned her upside down and then swung her back to the ground.
Damien stamped his foot in time to the music, driving them on through the final and most physically demanding section. ‘More!’
I don’t have anything more to give, Allegra thought, her body on the verge of collapse. Surely this has to be enough.
The music ended and she and Stephen slid apart and sank to the floor, panting. The choreographer marched over and stood towering above them. Allegra looked up.
‘Not good enough, Allegra. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you’d better buck your ideas up by tomorrow’s rehearsal or I’ll replace you and Stephen in Saturday’s performance with Tamzin and Valeri. I will not have months of my hard work undone by one lukewarm ballerina. Now get out of my rehearsal and don’t come back until you’re truly prepared to commit to this role!’
His face was pink now. Allegra was speechless. She looked at the clock. They still had half an hour. He couldn’t really be—
‘Get out,’ Damien said, and pointed to the door.
So Allegra left. She quickly changed her shoes and pulled on her stretchy black trousers, then she picked up her things, pushed the studio door open with her hip and walked out.
And she kept on walking. Out of the rehearsal studio, out of the building and out of her life.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALLEGRA’S brain was swimming. She’d just jumped out of a helicopter and onto Finn McLeod! And now he was standing over her, grinning like a maniac while the wind whipped around them, offering his hand.
She took it. How could she have done anything else?
She couldn’t tell if this was better or worse than her late-night fantasies when she’d been stuck on an island with no one but Fearless Finn for company—and entertainment. A big blob of water fell out of the sky and crashed onto her scalp, but Allegra was only aware of it in a distant, out-of-body kind of way.
The awareness that came from the warm hand clasped around her own? Now that was very much up-close and immediate, and definitely, definitely in her body. Just that simple action had caused her flesh to tingle and her pulse to do a series of jetés.
She was touching Finn McLeod. Actually holding his hand.
And as she looked into his eyes once again she realised that while TV Finn was just plain gorgeous, In The Flesh Finn had the kind of presence that made a girl’s nerve endings sizzle and her eyes water.
Or could that have something to do with the rain?
To be honest, she didn’t really care. She didn’t care about anything now; she was a million miles away from her life and Finn McLeod was holding her hand and talking to her in that beautiful Scottish accent of his. All she wanted to do was stare into those impossibly deep brown eyes…
Oh.
He’d been talking.
And now he’d stopped. He was also frowning at her. Why?
She suddenly became aware of the tension in his arm muscles, of the tugging sensation in her shoulder socket. He was pulling her. She was supposed to moving, getting up. Not letting her behind get damp on the sand. Not gawping at the most gorgeous-looking man she’d ever seen in real life.
Thankfully, she was well used to telling her body to do things it had no real inclination to do. She issued a command to her feet and legs and they obligingly pushed down into the sand, levering her upwards with the help of Finn’s hand, until she was standing opposite him.
Nobody moved for a few seconds. Not even the guy with the camera.
She’d done what he’d wanted, hadn’t she? She’d stood up. So why was he staring at her as if he wasn’t sure if she was human or not?
The downside to not being able to tear her gaze away from the deep brown eyes was that she was now privy to the slideshow of emotions flashing through them.
Bewilderment. Concern. Uncertainty.
And since he hadn’t looked anywhere else but right back at her since she’d sent him crashing onto the moist sand, the only conclusion she could come to was that he must be feeling all of those things about her.
Not good, Allegra. Pull yourself together. You know how to do that, don’t you? You should do. Part of the training. It should come as naturally as the other basics, like pliés and tendus.
She wrenched her gaze from his and stared out to sea, fixed it on the retreating black blob of the helicopter flying low over the water. It was much farther away than she’d thought it would be. Just how long had she been sitting on the beach, staring into Finn’s eyes?
‘Okay,’ she heard Finn say. ‘We’d better start sorting out some kind of shelter before it gets dark, or tonight will be our most miserable on the planet.’
She turned to face the land and watched him as he trudged up the beach towards the dense green vegetation fringing its edge. The camera guy, however, didn’t move. He just kept pointing his lens at Allegra, his feet braced into the sand.
She’d forgotten about the unseen bodies behind the camera when she’d phoned Finn’s producer back and agreed to do this. When the show aired it often seemed as if Finn was totally alone in whatever strange and exotic world he was exploring. And that was what she’d latched onto when she’d marched out of the rehearsal studio and had dug for her phone in her pocket—the chance of her very own private adventure with Fearless Finn.
Another drop of rain hit her scalp, as fat as a water bomb. She stared back at the camera lens, doing nothing, saying nothing. Just what exactly had she got herself into?
‘Come on, Dave,’ Finn yelled from under a huge palm tree as the water bombs began to multiply. Allegra couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if someone up there was aiming them directly at her, and they were an awfully good shot. Her long-sleeved shirt only had a few dry patches on it now, and water was dripping from her shorts down her bare legs.
Dave merely adjusted the focus ring on his camera, keeping it pointed straight at Allegra. ‘Not my job, mate!’ he yelled back. ‘I’m here to capture you two battling to survive the elements.’
She narrowed her eyes at the beady lens still trained on her, then took off up the beach, following her secret crush. If she stood next to Finn, that contraption would have to focus on something other than just her.
The camera—and Dave—followed.
‘You can look smug all you want,’ said Finn to his colleague, ‘but this storm is picking up fast and I doubt they’ll be sending the speedboat to pick you up and take you back to the hotel anytime soon.’ He bestowed a crinkly-eyed grin on Dave that made Allegra want to sit back down on the damp sand again. It was the hint of determination behind the laughter in his eyes that did it. The soft hairs behind her ears stood on end.
‘I reckon you’ve got two choices,’ Finn added. ‘Either you put that thing down and help us build a shelter big enough for three, or you can get all the footage you want, and when we’ve finished making our two-man lean-to we’ll make sure you get some great shots of us waving to you from the warm and dry.’
Fair choice, Allegra thought. Dave might not like it, but at least he had an option.
Dave grunted and pulled his camera off his shoulder. ‘I need to get the rain cover on, anyway,’ he muttered. ‘But I’m going to have to film some of the time—or Simon will have my hide.’
‘And a lovely rug for his office you’d make, too,’ Finn said, then pulled an absolutely huge knife from somewhere on his person and marched over to a clump of bamboo poles almost as thick as Allegra’s arms and began hacking at the base of one of them.
In no time at all he’d felled a good few. She stood there, watching him. It was odd, this sensation of being totally superfluous. Normally when she was at work everything revolved around her. She hadn’t realised how much she’d taken that for granted—or how much she’d actually liked it.
It was as if he’d totally forgotten she was there.
She coughed.
Finn hacked at bamboo.
She coughed again. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
Finn’s head snapped round, and she realised that her existence had indeed slipped his mind. He turned back to the bamboo before answering. ‘Yes. Go and collect some palm leaves and split them down the middle.’ And then he reached into a little pocket on his trousers, pulled out a small folding knife and tossed it onto the ground behind him.
Allegra reached forward and picked it up. She eased it open and stared at it.
She didn’t think she’d ever held anything like this before in her life. No need for tools like this in the cultured and contained garden squares of Notting Hill. She didn’t even know how to open it without cutting herself.
She almost opened her mouth to say as much, but then thought better of it.
She’d wanted something different, hadn’t she? No point complaining that ‘different’ was much less comfortable than she’d thought it would be. She just hadn’t expected to feel quite so much like a fish out of water.
The knife lay glinting in her hand.
Palm leaves? She looked around. Well, no shortage of them nearby, it seemed. It didn’t take more than ten minutes for her to gather a whole armful of such material. She dragged them back to where Finn was finishing with the bamboo and dumped them in a pile on the ground.
Finn rose from sitting on his haunches and put his hands on his hips as he scanned the area, looking for heaven knew what. She hoped it wasn’t snakes. But it didn’t matter what he was looking for or what he asked her to do. She’d seen every episode of his show and she knew he could look after himself in this jungle. And her. As a result, if Finn McLeod asked her to stand on her head and sing Twinkle, Twinkle, she’d do it. No questions asked.
So when Finn asked her to clear a patch of ground with a stick, she cleared a patch of ground with a stick, and she didn’t think about snakes. And when he showed her how to make rope out of vines and creepers, she plaited until her fingers were sore and numb with cold.
Meanwhile, Finn and Dave rigged up a simple triangular structure by lashing the bamboo poles together with her lumpily woven twine. It had a raised platform and a sloping roof frame that rose high at the front and joined the base at the back. Once it was steady enough, they blinked against the rain and worked on thatching the roof with the leaves she’d collected.
It was dry inside. Warm might have been stretching it a little.
They climbed inside, all three of them soaked to the skin, and sat in silence watching the water tip from the sky in skip loads.
You couldn’t call it rain. Rain didn’t blur the vision and make the sea boil. Rain was that delicate grey drizzle on a November afternoon in London. Or the short-lived exuberance of an April shower. This water falling from the sky with such weight and ferocity deserved another name entirely.
It might have been just bearable if she’d been sitting next to Finn, but Dave had barged his way between them when they’d climbed in, and she could hardly even see Finn past the cameraman’s muscular bulk.
‘Don’t suppose you could build a fire, could you?’ Dave asked hopefully.
‘Too wet,’ Finn replied. ‘We’ll have to wait for a break in the weather.’
Dave humphed. ‘Thought Fearless Finn’s motto was “Expect the impossible!”’
Finn just grinned back at him, then leaned forward to look at the sky again. ‘Just as well it isn’t rainy season,’ he said quite seriously.
Allegra was tempted to laugh. Really throw her head back and howl.
She didn’t, of course.
Instead she shifted from one buttock to the other. The only thing between her and the ground was a floor of hard bamboo poles. Finn had said they’d make it more comfortable with leaves and moss when there was dry foliage to be found, but until then it was bamboo or nothing. However, Allegra had very little in the way of padding on her derrière to make the former an attractive proposition.
Finn looked back at the pair of them, huddled nearer the back of the shelter. ‘Don’t think this is going to let off while it’s still light, though.’ He slapped Dave sympathetically on the shoulder. ‘You’re definitely stuck with us for the night.’
The hulk sitting next to her grunted again.
Hang on.
What had Finn said earlier?
‘D-did…’
Oh, bother. Her teeth were chattering. She clenched her jaw shut in an effort to still them, then tried again.
‘Did y-you say something about a hotel?’
Finn sighed. He had that bewildered-concerned-uncertain look on his face again. ‘Don’t believe all that internet chatter about me staying in five-star hotels and pretending I’m roughing it. On Fearless Finn, it’s the real deal.’
She’d said something wrong, hadn’t she? She looked at Dave. She was sure that Finn had said something about a hotel. Surely, they did something like that in emergencies? At times like this?
Finn caught her looking at Dave and read her mind. ‘Only the crew get that luxury. Dave needs to go back to base every evening to charge his batteries, get fresh tapes and to deliver the footage so Simon can watch the rushes. At night it should just be you, me, a night-vision camera rigged to a tree and a hand-held for us to use in case anything interesting happens.
Allegra felt her shoulders sag.
If that wasn’t bad enough news, she had a sneaking suspicion that her version of interesting when she and Finn were left here alone might be vastly different from his.
Just at that moment a crack of thunder split the sky above their heads, accompanied by a flash of lightning that seemed to arc from one edge of the horizon to the other. Allegra jumped so high she rattled the shelter. If it were possible, it began to rain even harder.
Finn stayed crouching at the front of the shelter, peering into the darkening chaos outside with a strange light in his eyes.
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ he asked, unable to tear his gaze away from the meteorological light show that was shaking the ground and rattling the very heavens.
