Free Save the Last Dance by Fiona Harper

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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,