Save the Last Dance by Fiona Harper

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.
    â€˜Don’t suppose you could build a fire, could you?’ Dave asked hopefully.
    â€˜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