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