Save the Last Dance: The Ballerina Bride / Invitation to the Boss's Ball

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.

‘Bloody fabulous,’ said Dave in a weary voice and flopped backward to sprawl on the bamboo poles.

Allegra really wanted to want to join Finn at the edge of the shelter, to mirror back to him the strange sense of awe in his eyes, but her bones felt so cold and damp she was sure they’d locked into position. So she didn’t do anything but sit huddled in a ball while the bamboo left permanent dents in her bottom, and tried to ignore the feeling she’d just made the worst mistake of her life.

The thunder was easing now, much to Finn’s disappointment. The rain continued, however. That he could have lived without. He and his two companions were still mighty damp, and there’d be no hope of drying out fully until the sun came up or he managed to build a fire. From the taste of the air, the smell of the bulbous clouds still dropping their loads, he’d guess the possibility was still hours away. That was a long time to wait with an out-of-sorts camera operator and a mouse-like ballerina.

Thinking of the ballerina… Night had fallen while the storm had been raging and she didn’t have much in the way of body fat to keep her warm. Dave, meanwhile, had more than enough. She’d be better off between the two of them.

‘Hey, Dave,’ he called into the darkness. ‘Why don’t you swap places with—’ what was her name again? ‘—Allegra?’

There was a short silence and then Dave sighed. The shelter shook, there was a whole lot of shuffling noises, an outraged female gasp followed by a mumbled apology, and then a reluctant Dave-type chuckle.

‘Just as well Anya Pirelli pulled out last minute,’ he muttered. ‘My missus would have confiscated certain parts of my anatomy and fried them up for breakfast if that had just happened with her.’

The taut little figure who was now beside Finn stiffened further and he winced on her behalf.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t feminine or attractive in her own understated, lean way. It was just that she wasn’t…well, Anya Pirelli. And there was nothing that she, or the other three billion women on the planet, could do about it.

‘I’m surprised Nat let you sign old Anya up in the first place,’ Dave added, snorting dryly.

A quiet voice murmured beside him in the blackness, almost as if she was speaking to herself and hadn’t meant to be overheard. ‘Nat?’

‘His fiancée,’ Dave said matter-of-factly. ‘Been engaged a while now. Took his time asking her, though. How long was it you’d been together? Three years? Four?’

The completeness of the tropical night meant he didn’t see the hearty slap Dave delivered to his shoulder coming.

‘Five,’ Finn said, noticing the defensive tone in his voice with no visuals to distract him. He really didn’t want to get into this right now. Having to build a shelter in the pouring rain had been a lovely distraction from the gaping chasm that had recently opened up in his personal life, thank you very much. And what business of Dave’s was it, anyway?

He shouldn’t be bothered by it, but people like Dave didn’t realise that he and Nat hadn’t had a traditional relationship. Their work schedules had meant they’d been apart more than they’d been together in five years, so it had been closer to one and a half years in normal people’s terms.

Dave sighed, his voice still tinged with good humour. ‘Didn’t think there was a woman alive who’d make old Finn here settle down!’

‘I’m not settling anywhere,’ Finn said quickly. And then he remembered his promise to Nat to keep quiet about the split and decided not to elaborate further. Settling down… Ugh. He hated that phrase, and probably would have reacted to it anyway. ‘I just felt I’d reached an age when it was time to stop wandering around and put down some roots.’

Nat’s comments from the previous evening started to swirl around his head, but he batted them away as if they were mosquitoes.

There was a mournful little sound from the huddled figure beside him. It started off almost like a moan but ended like a yawn. She must be exhausted. He and Dave were used to this relentless schedule, but it was hard on their guests. There wasn’t much to do now but wait until the rain stopped and talk amongst themselves, but Dave was as subtle—and as discreet—as a foghorn, and the sooner they ended this topic of conversation the better.

‘We might as well try to get some rest,’ Finn said.

All three of them shuffled until they were lying on the bamboo floor of the shelter. Finn was instantly still, but the other two fidgeted for quite some time. Hardly surprising, on a bed like this. Eventually, though, everything went still and quiet.

They weren’t quite touching, but he could sense Allegra was as stiff horizontal as she had been vertical. How odd. He was sure her name was more familiar now he thought about it, that Nat had dragged him along to watch her perform when they’d first been seeing each other.

Allegra Martin. That was her name.

He tried to sharpen the brief, fuzzy snatches of memory from that night. There wasn’t much to go on. He couldn’t remember where he and Nat had gone for dinner before the performance, or what either of them had worn, or even if they’d gone home together afterwards, but he remembered Allegra’s dancing.

Despite the fact he’d moaned loud and long about being dragged to Covent Garden, he’d actually been struck by the unexpected beauty of it all. Odd, really. Because to Finn McLeod beauty wasn’t normally found caged within four walls and a ceiling, no matter how grand the old building was. True beauty was usually found in wild, open spaces.

She must have been really young then. Little more than a kid. And yet he’d never seen something move that way before—so free and fluid and graceful. Except maybe the Northern Lights over the Arctic.

Didn’t seem to have much of that fluidity about her now, though, which was a pity. In the wild, you had to go with the flow. She was going to need every bit of flexibility she possessed if she was going to survive the challenges of the coming week.

He sighed, folded his hands behind his head and peered up into the featureless sky, hoping to see the twinkle of a star eventually. Perhaps conversation would have been better, because now the other two castaways were asleep he was left alone with his thoughts.

He’d thought he and Nat were the perfect couple. What on earth had gone wrong? He just didn’t get it.

Must still be numb, though, because he wasn’t feeling half as crushed as he’d expected to. Sad and disappointed, yes, but not devastated. But that was because he was strong, he supposed. Resilient.

He thought he saw a pinprick of light up above and stilled his thoughts for a few seconds while he tried to focus on it.

Hmm. Having a broken heart wasn’t nearly as bad as people said it was. He’d always thought those people who sang the whiny love ballads on the radio were being overly dramatic, and now he felt justifiably superior about being right about it all along.

He had a feeling his heart was mending already. In true Fearless Finn style, he was sure he’d survive.

The drip of water on the leaves above her head was keeping Allegra awake. At least, that was what she was telling herself. Drips and the cold. And the ridges of the bamboo poles, of course. It certainly wasn’t anything else.

Not the sense of being turned upside down and back to front. Not the electric charge thrumming between her and the man lying next to her. Or the fact it was almost certainly a one-way sensation. No, those things weren’t bothering her at all.

She sighed and rolled over onto her back. Every part of the motion was painful. She’d be bruised from head to toe in the morning, wouldn’t be able to dance properly for days…

Her stomach dropped to the same chilly temperature as the night air swirling around inside their makeshift shelter.

Dancing.

She wasn’t planning on doing any of that for the next seven days, was she? So it really shouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t be there to dance the Saturday evening performance of The Little Mermaid. Tamzin would be thrilled to take her place. So there was no need for Allegra to rehearse, no need to do class.

She sat up and hugged her arms around herself. Everyone would be furious with her. Stephen. Her father. The choreographer. The Artistic Director of the company… The list was endless.

She’d let them all down.

Guilt washed over her, matching its tempo to the crash of surf on the beach. She hugged herself tighter and rested her chin on her knees.

But she’d been letting them all down for months, anyway, hadn’t she? Who wanted a soulless robot as their partner, or their principal dancer? Or their daughter?

And now she was seeing the same hesitation in the eyes of the one man she’d hoped would save her from it. Collecting leaves and plaiting vines? He didn’t think she could do it, did he? Didn’t think she’d last a week on this island. She swivelled her head to look at Finn. Couldn’t see him, though, even though his feet must be right beside her. It was way too dark. She wanted very badly to poke him in the ribs right now and tell him he was wrong.

She didn’t, of course.

Mostly because she feared he was right. Escaping from her life had been such a wonderful fantasy. But that was all it had ever been—a fantasy. Too bad she hadn’t realised that before she’d snapped and turned it into a reality.

Now she was stuck here on a stormy desert island with a surly cameraman capturing her every shortcoming and a man who saw what everyone else saw when they looked at her. A disappointment.

To make matters worse, she’d probably kissed goodbye to her career as well. What had she been thinking?

Nothing.

She hadn’t been thinking at all, simply reacting. Like a tectonic plate that after years of crushing pressure had popped free, sending tremors in all directions. Every area of her life had been affected by this one rash decision. The only rash decision she’d ever made. She should have been thankful for her stale little life. At least last week she’d had a life.

Finn shifted position beside her and her heart did a little skip, a little flutter, and then settled back into place. She eased herself back down gently so she was facing him in the darkness, could feel the warmth of his even breath on her cheek.

The rain was easing off now, but she didn’t really register it because the drumming of her pulse in her ears picked up the insistent rhythm and kept it going.

This was stupid. She was reacting to his every movement, his every breath, as if she really were a love-struck teenager. At least, she imagined this was how teenage crushes went. She hadn’t really had time for them when she’d been the right age.

She’d lost herself in dancing in her teenage years—her way of coping with her mother’s death. When she’d been dancing, she hadn’t had to think about anything else. She’d been able to shelve the grief and let other emotions flow through her instead. Such a relief. But at some point in the last decade that well had dried up. She couldn’t seem to feel anything any more. She’d even stopped missing her mother.

Soulless…

She closed her eyes against the velvet darkness, even though it made no difference—shut out no extra light from her eyeballs.

In the utter and complete darkness senses other than sight started working overtime. Her whole body throbbed in response to the nearness of Finn. It seemed those set-aside teenage hormones had definitely caught up with her. She’d not really had many chances to release them before now. She’d had a few relationships, all brief and fairly unsatisfying, all eventually sacrificed to a career that didn’t believe in evenings and weekends.