The Ballerina Bride

by Fiona Harper

  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.

  And then one night after a performance, when she’d been too hyped up to sleep, she’d switched on the television and clapped eyes on Finn McLeod, and that had been that.

  Teenage crush. Big time.

  Except most teenagers didn’t get the opportunity to do anything but stare at a poster on their bedroom wall. If they were lucky, they might catch a fleeting glimpse of their crush outside a theatre or a TV studio. They certainly weren’t offered the chance to spend a week alone with him on a desert island.

  And there lay the problem.

  Crush and opportunity had collided, and now she was reaping the consequences. Unfortunately, sleep was nowhere to be found and in the silence and darkness consequences were hitting her fast and hard in the middle of her forehead.

  She breathed out slowly and lay very still.

  She’d done it now. There was no going back. She’d have to live with those consequences. Even the fact that Finn McLeod thought she was a hopeless substitute for the hot tennis player who should have been lying beside him in the shelter instead of her.

  In the midst of all the doubts and fears swirling in
side her, something happened. Something small hardened. A tiny seed. A kernel of determination and perseverance. The very thing that had helped her survive ballet school and the early days of the company and had rocketed her to where she was now.

  She’d show him. She’d ace every task, follow every instruction to the letter.

  Come morning, she’d show Finn McLeod—and the surly cameraman—exactly what she was made of.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A NOISE startled Allegra from a shallow sleep. She’d been dreaming of being made to walk a tightrope over a deep, dark chasm, only the tightrope had morphed into an endless succession of bamboo poles. Somewhere below her she’d heard Finn McLeod, urging her to jump, telling her he’d catch her, but he’d been hidden in the darkness. She’d had no idea where he was or how far down she’d have to fall before he saved her, so she’d just kept walking the bamboo poles until her feet had throbbed and her soles had bled.

  She sat up quickly—too quickly—to rub her feet and check they were okay, but the unexpected discovery of a heavy hiking boot where she’d expected to find tender flesh meant she jammed one finger backwards in an awkward direction and had to stifle a yelp of pain.

  She shook her head and rubbed her eyes. Those boots made her feet feel like foreign objects. Heavy and dull and stiff. None of the clothes she was wearing—bar her underwear—were her own. Not the cargo trousers stuffed into her backpack or the shorts, vest top and beige long-sleeved shirt she was wearing now. The decision to come had been so last-minute and she’d had nothing remotely suitable in her wardrobe, so the production company had kitted her out. Sparsely.

  Consciousness returned enough for her to glance around and orient herself—not that she had totally forgotten where she was. The poles beneath her were a too-constant reminder for that.

  She was alone in the shelter, and outside it was light. Not too bright, but definitely light. Carefully, very carefully, she bottom-shuffled her way to the edge of the shelter and peered out.

  Oh, wow.

  This morning the beach looked a totally different place. The sand that had seemed a dirty beige yesterday was now a shimmering pale gold, and the churning grey sky had melted into the soft blue of a baby’s blanket. She was still cold, though. They’d made their camp at the fringes of the jungle, where sand and earth met, and the long shapes of the trees reaching down the beach meant the shelter was still shrouded in shadow.

  Her legs were as stiff as if she’d done three performances of Swan Lake back to back, and they creaked as she swung them over the edge of the shelter’s sleeping platform and let the weight of her boots pull her feet downwards onto the sandy earth.

  She stretched a little—an unbreakable habit from her training—stood up and walked away from the shelter, further down the beach, wondering where her fellow castaways were. There were footprints in the sand leading off to the right and then curving towards the jungle, but none coming back the same way.

  She was completely on her own. Nobody to tell her how to behave or think or even move. There was a whole beach of virgin sand, swept clean by the morning’s tide, waiting for her. She could lie down and make sand angels if she wanted, or cartwheel down to the shore and plop into the sea.

  She didn’t, of course.

  After staring at the vast expanse for a few seconds, she turned and followed the footprints, placing her feet carefully inside the larger dents in the sand.

  She hadn’t paid too much attention to her home for the coming week the evening before. Too busy trying to get the shelter up to worry about the scenery. Their camp was on a wide strip of sand that filled almost all of a gently curving bay with low rocky headlands at either end. At the left edge of the bay, maybe only thirty feet out to sea, was a small island. Well, a large rock, really. But its top must have been above the high tide line because a small tree grew on top, giving just enough shade for some scrubby grass to flourish underneath.

  Away from the shore, the land was covered with dense green vegetation, and rose gently until it peaked in a rocky hill. Not exactly mountainous, but with the lack of any other geographical features, it seemed enormous.

  It struck her that she didn’t even properly know where she was—except the surf on the beach was the Pacific and the nearest land mass was Panama.

  She stopped walking and turned on the spot. Where had Finn and the cameraman got to?

  Even though the rising sun was now starting to warm her face she shivered. Her clothes were still damp from the night before and her stomach was very, very empty. It was beautiful here, to be sure, but she had a sudden overwhelming sense of her own vulnerability.

  She was saved from pondering a slow and nasty death from starvation by a crashing sound. She’d reached the end of the tracks in the sand now, where they disappeared into the undergrowth, and before she could decide whether she should freeze or run, Finn burst through the bushes and was standing before her, dragging what looked like half a dead tree behind him. Dave appeared a few seconds later, puffing and muttering things under his breath that she was glad she couldn’t hear.

  ‘Great! You’re up,’ Finn said, and smiled at her.

  She nodded, suddenly unsure of what to say. The whole of the English language was at her disposal. All she had to do was pick a word. And what did she do? She nodded. Pathetic. But there were too many words. There was too much choice, and faced with so many overwhelming options she’d backed away and chosen nothing.

  ‘First things first,’ Finn said, marching back towards the camp, obliterating his own footprints as he went. ‘We need to build a fire and get warm, and we need to worry about food and water.’

  Worry? Allegra almost laughed out loud. When did Fearless Finn worry about anything? He seemed to be glowing with strength and health and confidence this morning, as if the night battling the elements had revitalised him somehow.

  She sighed and scurried after him.

  No wonder the TV cameras ate him up. No wonder a whole army of women back home had linked themselves on the internet through blogs and social networking sites and referred to themselves as ‘Finn’s Fanatics’.

  But the camera didn’t catch all of him. It didn’t catch the raw energy that pulsed from every pore, the sense that anything and everything could and would happen around him, even—as the show’s tagline hinted—the impossible. It definitely didn’t catch the way his throwaway smiles turned a girl’s knees to chocolate.

  Allegra flicked a look across at Dave. While she’d been admiring the rear view of Finn dragging the tree across the beach, he’d trained the camera back on her.

  She wanted to growl. Instead she swallowed.

  Cameras might not catch all of Finn, but she knew they were very good at catching all sorts of things that people didn’t think they’d given away, and the last thing she wanted was the camera noticing her noticing Finn. That would be far, far too humiliating.

  Finn watched carefully as Allegra struck his knife on the flint he’d given her. Not even a spark. And there wasn’t likely to be one if she kept stroking that knife against the flint. The fluffed up coconut husk underneath would never catch light. It was her first go at something like this, though—that much was obvious—so he bit his tongue and sat back on his haunches and watched. For now. She’d get it eventually; she just needed to find her own rhythm with it.

  Far from moaning about being cold and damp this morning, she’d hardly said a word. She’d just stared at him with her doll’s eyes, listening intently to every word that had dropped out of his mouth about tinder and kindling and fuel, and then she’d helped him gather exactly the right stuff, no further guidance necessary. And when he’d explained how to build the fire, she’d watched and then reproduced, following his instructions to the letter.

  Far from being a diva, this little ballerina was turning out to be a pleasant sur
prise.

  The only thing lacking now was a spark.

  She paused her efforts and glanced up at him, a questioning, slightly panic-laced expression in her eyes. It was the first time that morning he’d seen her show any emotion at all.

  ‘In the wild places of this planet, fire is everything,’ he said quietly, and her eyes grew the tiniest bit wider and rounder. ‘Without fire, we couldn’t survive. We need it to purify the water, to cook, to provide protection and warmth. I’ll give you plenty more opportunities to learn, but for now I think we’re cold enough for me to take over.’

  She blinked and her chin rose an almost imperceptible amount.

  Finn let a half-smile pull one side of his mouth upwards. A little bit stubborn, too, this girl. Good. She’d need that if she was going to pass the challenges this week would bring—especially the final surprise challenge he put all his celebrity guests through in the new programme format.

  She handed the knife and flint over to him and he set about starting the fire.

  ‘Actually, there’s one thing that’s even more important than fire in survival situations,’ he said.

  The coconut husk was smoking now. He picked the ball of fluff up and blew on it gently, coaxing the flame to life. Making a fire took practice, but it also took instinct—knowing exactly the right time to trust the almost invisible sparks to do their job, when to blow, how hard and for how long.

  A tiny orange flame sprang from almost nowhere, and he turned the ball of fibres in his hand, letting it grow, and then he placed it gently on the fire pit they’d created and starting stacking the kindling around it. He couldn’t help himself; he had to smile. He always got a kick out of this, no matter how many times he did it. He glanced up at Allegra and found her smiling back at him.