Free The Perfect Hero by Victoria Connelly Page A

loads of encouragement and being such a sweetheart.
    Gemma had then climbed the steps up into one of the vans that was being used as a dressing room and sat down in what she had come to think of as ‘the chair of doom’ whilst a make-up artist turned her into a nineteenth-century heroine. It was the most bizarre of processes, Gemma thought. She didn’t usually bother much with make-up and having somebody else attacking you with sponges, brushes and pencils was somewhat alarming.
    Beth, of course, was loving it. She adored any form of attention and would always be sure to complain if she thought she wasn’t getting enough.
    ‘Shouldn’t I be wearing more mascara than that?’ Beth asked, peering into the mirror with a horrified expression on her face.
    ‘You’re playing Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion ,’ Sophie said with a laugh. ‘Not Sally Bowles in Cabaret !’
    Gemma tried to hide her smile. Beth had already been severely reprimanded by Teresa for wearing scarlet lipstick. They’d been halfway through shooting a scene before Teresa had noticed and then she’d gone completely mad.
    Make-up complete, it was time for the costumes which were so beautiful that it was hard not to fall in love with them and try to smuggle them home with you, especially if you were an Austen fan like Gemma and Sophie were. It was such a novelty to be wearing something other than jeans. How many women wore pretty, feminine dresses any more? And the fabrics that had been chosen were exquisite. The only problem was that they did absolutely nothing to keep the cold out and, when shooting on a windblown Cobb, that could result in white limbs covered in goosebumps.
    But there was more to a part than make-up and a costume, Gemma thought. You had to be the character. When she’d got the call from her agent telling her she’d got the part of Anne Elliot, she’d done a little dance in her living room and had then grabbed a copy of the book and read it right through. And then the panic had set in. Playing Anne Elliot was a huge responsibility. For many readers, she was the perfect Jane Austen heroine: selfless, loyal and compassionate. Some even felt that she was Jane Austen herself and it was made all the more special for being the last novel she wrote. She’d been writing it when she was dying and, to ardent fans, it was felt that it was the closest they would ever get to their beloved author. There was an honesty and a simplicity about Persuasion . It might not have the exuberance of Pride and Prejudice or the naughtiness of Emma but it was all the more dear because of that, Gemma thought.
    But the reason Gemma loved the novel so much was because of Anne. Readers couldn’t fail to feel Anne’s pain, for which of us hasn’t experienced the pain of a lost love? We have all had our hearts broken and we have all made mistakes, Gemma thought. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy to identify with Anne.
    So, what if the fans didn’t like Gemma? What if she let them down? What if they didn’t believe that she was Anne? That was one of the major worries about adapting a much-loved novel. People knew them so well and had incredibly strong views as to how a character should be portrayed.
    ‘I don’t care how handsome he was,’ a fan might say, ‘he was not my idea of Mr Darcy.’
    ‘Her hair! Did you see Fanny Price’s hair? What were they thinking of ?’
    Gemma sighed. Adapting a classic novel was a minefield and taking on the role of its heroine was fraught with potential disasters.
    As Gemma got up to leave the relative warmth of the van and was rudely accosted by the wind which quickly whipped around her thin muslin dress, she could only hope that her performance wouldn’t disappoint the legion of fans out there.
    She was just trying to take shelter in the curve of the Cobb until she was needed when a dark-haired man walked past her. It was the man from the bar at The Three Palms – the one on whom she’d turned her