The Perfect Hero: The perfect summer read for Austen addicts!. Victoria Connelly

back.’

      ‘How’s it going?’

      ‘Not good. We think we might get a couple of shots in but the wind’s really picked up and it’s going to rain,’ Gemma said.

      Adam nodded. ‘It’s meant to be quite heavy.’

      ‘Oh, dear,’ Gemma said, looking anxious.

      ‘It’ll be all right,’ Adam said. ‘You worry too much, Gemma.’

      Kay observed the look that passed between Adam and Gemma, and smiled. They were so cute together.

      What Kay didn’t notice, however, was the fact that Adam’s gaze soon left Gemma’s face and returned to hers.

       Chapter Eleven

      Of course, it shouldn’t have been Gemma who’d run back to Wentworth House to find a copy of Persuasion but she’d taken off before Teresa could stop her. Any excuse to get off the set for a while and postpone the inevitable.

      And Adam had been there. He’d even walked back with her, giving her 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 back.

      ‘Hello,’ he said.

      Gemma nodded.

      ‘You okay?’ he asked. ‘You look cold.’

      ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Gemma said politely, half-expecting him to move on to wherever he had to move on to. But he didn’t.

      ‘That dress doesn’t look very substantial,’ he said.

      ‘It isn’t,’ Gemma said and then blushed as she saw his eyes sweep over her exposed bosom.

      ‘ROB?’ a voice yelled from the other end of the Cobb. ‘Get over here, will you?’

      The man shrugged. ‘No rest for the wicked,’ he said and, as quickly as he’d appeared, he disappeared, leaving Gemma with the impression that he was, indeed, very wicked. But rather cute too.

      Adam always felt like a bit of a spare part when he was on set. For a start, he wasn’t really needed. Nobody asked him his opinion about the way a scene should be shot and, if there were any questions about the script, they were always directed to Teresa. But he didn’t mind. He quite liked being in the background. It gave him a chance to observe everything that was going on around him. He loved the bustle of film sets – the excitement had never waned over the years. No matter how many he’d been on one, there was always something different to experience. For the Persuasion shoot, it was the transformation of the Cobb. There were canteen trucks, trucks for the actors full of costumes and make-up, vans full of cables, dolly tracks down for the camera, and ropes cordoning off several streets with notices up apologising for any inconvenience. He’d been working on a film up in Scotland when the 2006 production of Persuasion had been shooting in Lyme Regis and he’d been gutted to miss it. Now, he took a step back and gloried in the chaos that he’d caused by sitting down to write a script one day.

      He’d been told about the burst pipe at The Three Palms and how Teresa had managed to find Wentworth House. Adam smiled as he’d thought about its new owner. It had been her, hadn’t it? The girl with the toffee-coloured hair he’d seen outside the estate agents. She hadn’t recognised him but how could she have? He hadn’t exactly made his presence known that day, had he? But he remembered her. There’d been something about her that had captivated him immediately. She had a sweetness about her the like of which he’d never seen before and it had been so easy to talk to her. He’d been surprised at how at ease he’d felt in her company. Women usually had the effect of tying him up in knots but Kay had loosened him. Gemma was the same. He adored Gemma and cared enormously about her but she didn’t give him that fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach that Kay did.

      Adam took a deep breath of salty air. Now was not a good time to fall head over heels. He’d just started a new screenplay and was up to his eyeballs in ideas plus there was still so much to sort out with the film. His phone never stopped ringing. Unless he switched it off, of course, which he often did when he was writing. His imagination was working at full capacity at the moment and there really wasn’t room to start imagining romantic scenarios in his own life. He had to write those of his characters first. But that was easier said