Save the Last Dance (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Forty-eight hours earlier

A
LLEGRA
 
stood rigid in the wings as the corps de ballets rushed past her and onto the stage of the Royal Opera House.
Breathe,
she reminded herself.
Relax. You've done these steps a thousand times in rehearsal. Your body knows what to do. Trust it.

Too late for more rehearsal now. She'd be on stage in a matter of minutes.

Even so, she couldn't stop herself marking the opening sequence on the spot, her arms and legs carving tiny, precise arcs in the air as they mirrored the full-blown sequence of turns and jumps in her head.

Frustrated, she stopped herself mid-movement, pulled her cardigan off and dumped it somewhere she'd be able to find it later before resuming her position in the wings. As she listened to the orchestra and watched the corps de ballet set the scene, she arched one foot then the other, pressing her shoes into the floor until there was a tight but pleasing stretch in her instep.

Pretend it's just the dress rehearsal. Just another run-though.

She tried very hard to do just that but the adrenalin skipping through her system called her a liar.

Not just a rehearsal, but opening night.

No familiar role, either. Neither for dancers nor audience.

This was a brand new role created just for her. Created to prove the child prodigy, the ‘baby ballerina' hadn't lost her sparkle after seven long years in the profession. This new ballet,
The Little Mermaid
, was supposed to silence the critics who'd been prophesying for years now that Allegra Martin would burn brightly and then, just as quickly, burn out.

They'd been saying that since she'd turned twenty and now—three years past that sell-by date—she was sensing the creeping inevitability of that prediction every time she put on her pointe shoes. She almost dreaded sliding her feet into them these days.

Not tonight. It couldn't be tonight. Her father would be devastated.

To distract herself from these unwanted thoughts, she checked her costume. No stiff tutu for this role. Her dress was soft and flowing, ending just below her knees. Layers of chiffon in deep blue, aquamarine and turquoise. And her dark hair, instead of being pulled into its habitual bun, was loose and flowing round her shoulders; only two small sections at the front were caught back to keep it off her face. She resisted the urge to fiddle with the grips, knowing it would probably only make things worse.

The orchestra began a new section of music. It wasn't long now. She should try and focus, slow her butterfly-wing breaths and let her ribs swell with oxygen. She closed her eyes and concentrated on pulling the air in and releasing it slowly.

Behind her eyelids an image gatecrashed her efforts at calm and inner poise. A pair of dark masculine eyes that crinkled at the corners as an unseen mouth pulled them into a smile. She snapped her own eyes open.

Where had that come from?

Now her heart was beating double speed. Damn. She needed to get her thoughts under control. Less than a minute and she'd be making her entrance. She shook her head and blew out some air.

And then it happened again. With her eyes open.

But this time she saw the smile beneath the eyes. Warm and bright and just a little bit cheeky.

It must be the stress.

Weeks of preparing for this moment had finally got to her. She'd heard other dancers mention the strange random thoughts that plagued them before a performance, but it had never happened to her before. No sudden musings on what she was going to have for dinner that evening or whether she'd remembered to charge her mobile phone.

But why was she thinking of
him?

A man she didn't even know.

What was he doing here, invading her thoughts at such a crucial moment? It was most unsettling. The last thing she needed right now. And she really meant
right now.
The violins had just picked up the melody that signalled her entrance.

Thankfully, her body had been rehearsed so hard the steps were almost a reflex and it sprang to life and ran onto the stage, dragging her disjointed head with it. There was a moment of hush, a pause in the music, and she sensed every person in the audience had simultaneously and unconsciously held their breath.

They were watching her. Waiting for her.

It was her job to dazzle and amaze, to transport them to another world. And, just as she lifted her arm in a port de bras that swept over her head, preparing her for a series of long and lilting steps across the diagonal of the stage, she wished that were possible. She wished that she
could
escape into another world. And maybe stay there. Somewhere new, somewhere exciting, where no one expected anything of her and she had no possibility of failing to make the grade.

But tonight, while she made the audience believe she was the Little Mermaid, while they saw her float and turn and defy gravity, she would know the truth. She would feel the impact of every jump in her whole skeleton. She would hear the knocking of her pointe shoes on the stage even if the orchestra drowned out the noise for the audience. She would feel her toes rub and blister inside their unforgiving, solid shoes.

No, she knew the reality of ballet. It might look effortless from the outside, but from the inside it was hard and demanding. It was beautiful, but it wasn't pretty or nice. A fierce kind of beauty that asked for your very soul in return for greatness, and then devoured it without compunction.

She had chosen this path and there was no escape. There
was
no other world. It was all an illusion.

But she would fool them all. She would dance like a girl who was full of sadness, trapped in a state of endless longing, wishing for a reality that could never be hers. And she would dance it well. She wouldn't even be acting, because it was the truth. Her truth.

No escape. No matter how much you wanted it.

Truth like the pain of a thousand knives.

‘It was marvellous, darling. Absolutely stunning.'

Allegra air-kissed the woman whose name she couldn't remember and smiled back. ‘Thank you. But, really, the credit has to go to Damien, for giving me such wonderful choreography to work with.'

Bad form for a principal dancer to hog all the credit. She was merely the vessel for someone else's genius, after all. The blank canvas for someone else to paint their vision on.

‘Nonsense,' the woman said, waving her glass of champagne and spilling a drop on the arm of one of the other guests. Neither one noticed. But Allegra saw it all. She saw every last detail of the after-show party in crisp, exquisite, painful detail.

She saw the Victorian steel and glass arches of the tall hall that had once been part of Covent Garden's famous flower market, the white vertical struts and pillars so straight, so uniform that it felt they were penning her in. She saw the herds of people milling, champagne classes pinched between their fingers, half of them trying to gawp at her while not getting caught. Most of all she saw the tempting patches of midnight-blue beyond the glass and white-painted iron-work of the roof.

If colours could talk, she mused, blue would be an invitation.

Come to me…

She wrenched her eyes off the night sky with difficulty and focused them back where they were supposed to be. ‘Excuse me,' she said, bestowing the woman with a gracious smile. ‘I see my father over there…'

The woman glanced over her shoulder to where her father was half-hidden by the ostentatious champagne bar filling the middle of the room and then smiled widely back at Allegra. ‘Of course, of course. Such a talented conductor and a wonderful man… And it must be fantastic to know that your father is close by on an opening night. What a marvellous sense of support he must give you.'

Allegra wanted to say,
No, actually, it isn't.
She wanted to say that sometimes, having a parent so invested in one's life was anything
but
comforting. She wanted to shock the woman by telling her how many times she'd wished her father was a builder or a schoolteacher. Anything but a conductor. Or how much she wished he'd sit in the back of the stalls occasionally, as the other parents did, rather than standing only a few feet beyond the footlights. Maybe then she wouldn't feel weighed down by his gaze, weighed down by all the hopes and expectations of not just a parent but also her manager and her mentor.

She didn't say anything, of course, but smiled softly in what the woman probably took for gracious agreement, then used the excuse of her fabulous father to make her departure.

Of course, the press loved the father-daughter angle—devastated widower conducts as ballerina daughter tops the bill, just as he'd done for her tragic mother when she'd been alive. They ate it up.

In her darker moments she silently accused him of loving it, too, of wanting double the glory. Double the adoration. But it wasn't that, really. He just wanted things to be the way they'd been before, wanted to claw back time and resurrect the dead. Impossible, of course, so he'd had to settle for second best. Even so, Allegra hadn't failed to see how he'd come back to life when she'd grown old enough to fill her mother's shoes, dance her mother's old roles.

But not tonight. This one was all hers. No comparisons could be made. She would stand or fall in her own right when the reviews came out in the morning.

She supposed that since she'd used her father as an excuse she'd better go and say hello, so she forged through the crowd, ignoring the people who tried to catch her eye. And there were plenty. She was the star of the show. It was
her
evening, after all.

But she didn't want to talk to them. Not the ones she knew in the company who either envied or idolised her, nor the ones she didn't know, who saw her as some strange creature imbued with magical powers. Gifted—or should that be cursed?—with a talent they daren't even dream of having. They looked at her as if she was somehow different from them. As if she were an alien from outer space. Something to be studied and discussed and dissected. But not human. Never human.

What she wouldn't give for one person on this planet to see past the tutus and the pointe shoes.

More than once she had to change direction when a gap between bodies closed up. Eventually, she just stood still and waited. Chasing the holes in the crowd was impossible; she would wait for the tide of bodies to shift once again and let the gaps come to her. Her stillness, however, was just another way to mark herself out from the other guests.

All around her people were celebrating. It had taken an army of people months to prepare for this night, and now they'd pulled it off their relief and joy was spilling out of them in smiles and laughter and excited conversation.

But Allegra felt nothing.

No joy. No bubbling. Nothing inside desperate to spill out of her.

Except, maybe, a desire to scream.

It was funny, really. For a few years now she'd wondered what would happen if one day she did exactly that. What would they all do if the habitually reserved Allegra Martin planted her feet in the centre of the room and split the hubbub with a scream that had forced its way up from the depths of her soul?

The look on their faces would be priceless.

She treasured this little fantasy, because it had got her through more stuffy cocktail parties, lunches and benefits than she cared to count. Only it didn't seem quite as funny any more, because tonight she felt like making the fantasy a reality. She really felt like doing it for real. In fact, the urge was quickly becoming irresistible, and that was scaring her.

She had to start moving again, keep walking at all costs, even if she ended up momentarily heading away from her father, because she feared that if she paused, that if her two feet stayed grounded for long enough, she might just do it.

Despite her meandering progress across the Floral Hall, she had almost reached her father now. He hadn't noticed her silent zig-zagging approach, however, because he was deep in conversation with the Artistic Director. She heard her name mentioned briefly above the din of the party. Neither man looked happy.