Save the Last Dance Read Free Page B

dark hair, that never seemed to sit quite right, flopped over one side of his forehead and a smile stretched his stubble-studded jaw. She’d had no idea they were showing late-night reruns of Fearless Finn. Just as well, really, because if she’d known she could have watched him jumping into rapids and hanging off mountains by his fingertips all night long, she might have done just that. Unfortunately, a sleep-deprived ballerina at the Royal Opera House would not have gone down well.
    Sometimes, she thought, as she tugged an extra pillow from beside her and stuffed it behind her shoulders, she felt so old. That wasn’t right at twenty-three, was it? But she felt as if she’d been riding the same unrelenting merry-go-round of classes, rehearsals and performances for so long that her life had sped up, and she’d aged faster than she should have done. It was hardly surprising that, deep down, she longed for something fresh, something new.
    Her gaze returned to the screen, where Finn McLeod, in his gorgeous, rolling Scottish accent, was explaining how to find food if one was unlucky enough to be stranded in the mountains.
    She smiled. Really grinned. See? She’d never realised there were tiny little seeds inside pine cones that could be prised out and eaten.
    Or had she?
    She supposed she had. She had pine nuts on her pasta all the time. It was just that she’d never connected the tree on the mountainside with the tiny packet on the supermarket shelf, never thought about what bit of the tree the nut came from or how it could be harvested.
    And that was why she loved watching Fearless Finn. It reminded her she was young, that there was so much of the world she had yet to see, so much to learn about life. The feeling would well up inside her until she wished she could literally climb inside the flickering rectangle on the wall and run down that hillside with him, or taste that pine nut fresh from the cone for herself.
    Finn turned to the camera and grinned, getting right up close to the lens, before flinging himself off a rocky riverbank and into the fast-flowing water.
    Okay, maybe education about the planet wasn’t the only reason she watched this show. But he was so…so…
    She didn’t really know what he was, or exactly how he made her feel, only that she felt alive watching him, that she believed she could sprout wings and fly away when he was on the screen.
    Another symptom of the narrow, ultra-focused life one had to live if one was going to get to the top in her profession. Ballet had to be everything. So, just as she felt she didn’t know much about the big wide world beyond the ballet studio, she didn’t really have a lot of experience with men, either.
    But seeing that six foot hunk of testosterone and adventure, with his unruly dark hair and even unrulier dark eyes, made her want to learn a little more about both.
    She blushed hard and bit her lip. It seemed her first teenage crush had finally arrived after a rather lengthy, ballet-related delay.
    Well, so what? Everyone had their guilty pleasures, didn’t they? Finn McLeod was hers. And until the milk floats began to moan through Notting Hill, outside her father’s tall white house, she was going to forget all about ballet and mermaids and morning editions, and lose herself in a pair of captivating brown eyes.
    Watching dawn break from the top of a glacier was definitely the way Finn McLeod liked to start his day. The horizon had been the clearest, purest cobalt but now as the sun pushed upward it slowly turned an icy, pale blue.
    â€˜Wow,’ the A-list Hollywood actor who stood beside him said.
    Wow, indeed.
    â€˜This is, like, perfect,’ the guy said, nodding gently.
    â€˜Yup,’ said Finn. It didn’t get much better than this.
    He and Tobias Thornton, action movie god, stood there, silent, staring at the awesome display Creation was putting on for them, better than any celluloid car chase