“Thanks for tuning in to Celebrity Dancing Shoes. Welcome to everybody in the studio and the millions of viewers at home! I’m Charles Bingley and this is my co-host, that elegant but annoying sister of mine, Caroline Bingley.” Charles flashed a big grin at the camera, earning a smack on the arm from Caroline.
“Hello everybody! Just ignore Charles. He has grown up to be quite silly. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the format of our highly successful show as it enters into its fifth season. We take celebrities who have had no formal dance training and pair them up with professional dancers. Over the course of ten weeks, the celebrity has to learn ballroom, Latin and several other forms of dance. Each week, during our live broadcast, one couple is voted off, based on a combination of the scores they received from the judges and the votes they received from the viewing audience. If the scores are tied for two couples, the one with more audience votes wins.”
“Tonight is our final competition of the season. In Week Eight, there were only two couples left. Our first gentleman is William Darcy, a very good friend of mine. The world-famous artificial-heart inventor pairs up with waltz champion Ann de Bourgh. The money raised from your votes for him goes to the Heart Foundation.” Caroline said, “And George Wickham, our home-grown Bollywood heartthrob, unfortunately pairs up with British rumba champion Eliza Bennet.”
“Why ‘unfortunately’?” Charles asked. “Elizabeth is beautiful, talented and hot!”
“Which is unfortunate for all of our female viewers at home,” Caroline explained, “since Miss Eliza has put her hands all over George’s body for so many weeks. The viewers, I’m sure, would like to trade places with her. And George’s charity is ‘No More Bullies.’”
“Darcy has a lot of female fans out there, too,” Charles stated, rallying for his friend. “Although the judges have said that he learned and executed the techniques of every dance very well, they do agree that he has been too uptight, not showing any emotion when he dances with Ann. As a result, he hasn’t been receiving very good scores from the judges. Week after week, I’ve expected him to be voted off, but my handsome friend must have thousands of female fans voting for him, because he’s still here tonight in the final.”
“As for George and Miss Eliza, they have been leading every week,” Caroline noted with a dazzling smile for the camera. “His dancing techniques are not as precise as Darcy’s, but George is more entertaining and charming on the dance floor, and he matches well with Miss Eliza.”
Charles held up a cautioning finger. “But our ‘devil’ judge, Frederick Wentworth, said on Week Seven that he sensed that George’s ‘sincerity’ might well be fake, and he believed that there was tension between the partners. And he gave them a very low score of five.”
“That sent the gossip magazines and talk shows into a frenzy,” Caroline added smugly. “Everyone heard, at the beginning of the series, that Bollywood George seemed to be very taken with Miss Eliza. He has been seen visiting her home in Meryton, taking her to nightclubs and, in fact, leaving her place on a few early mornings in ‘not so tidy’ attire. In fact, I recall a headline from a gossip magazine during Week Five that claimed that Miss Eliza was caught buying a home pregnancy test kit. It read, ‘Small-Town Hoofer Preggers by Bollywood Bad Boy!’”
“Caroline, I’m sure that was pure gossip!”
“Was it?” Caroline held up a colorful tabloid magazine.
“Here’s a headline from Week Seven, when Miss Eliza was said to have come out of a local clinic with tears in her eyes. ‘Dumped Dancer Seeks Abortion.’”
Outraged by Caroline’s deviations from the script, Charles deftly changed the subject. “Then both couples should thank our producer, Jimmy Forester, who has introduced a fateturning twist. We announced two weeks ago that the remaining couples would switch partners for the final two weeks of the competition. Darcy is now paired up with Elizabeth, and Ann with George. Let’s roll the camera and see our new couples in training.”
In the first film clip, a hot and flushed Elizabeth, who had apparently just finished a training session, was interviewed by Caroline. The latter was dressed impeccably in an orange princess dress accentuated with a multicolour silk scarf and a two-storey hairdo.
“How lucky, Miss Eliza! You got to pair up with William and even stay as a guest at Pemberley, his impressive country estate, for two weeks. How did a small-town girl like you fare? I image his ballroom is bigger than your entire house. I hope you didn’t get lost in the corridors.”
“There are a lot of lovely trees, flowers, birds and small animals on the grounds here. I love being able to lose myself in Nature when I finish a day’s training.”
“Miss Eliza, we saw your shocked reactions when we announced the switch of dance partners. Was it because William was heard saying you only had a ‘tolerable figure’ and that your mother was ‘coarse and mercenary'?” Caroline asked, her tone snide.
“Oh, did Darcy say that? Remind me to introduce him to my uncle. You could say that he is even more ‘coarse and mercenary’ than my mom, since he is in the gold mining industry,” Elizabeth replied, and grinned.
She then added in a serious but sweet tone, “I’ve been training with George for eight weeks. Naturally, I wanted to complete the competition with him and win the trophy. I was just shocked with a swap so late into the series. I’m a professional, though, and I'm sure I could teach even a skeleton to dance well.” Gossip magazines often laughed at Caroline, saying that she walked and danced like a skeleton dipped in orange paint because she was so thin, behaved so arrogantly and wore orange clothing all the time.
“Oh, you wanted to win the trophy with George? How touching! Then the off-camera rumors must be true. Are you pregnant?”
“You seem awfully interested in home pregnancy kits, Caroline…” Elizabeth winked while Caroline’s face turned deadly red. “As for me, I only went to the pharmacy to buy high blood pressure pills for my mom. Perhaps you need some? You look quite red now. Maybe you have high blood pressure, too.”
The footage stopped there, and the studio audience broke into a fit of laughter.
Charles couldn’t help but laugh, too. Then he continued, “The gossips did absolute wonders for our ratings. Last week, we did a recap of our couples’ journey to the Finals, to allow our newly formed couples two weeks of bonding time, and over 5 million viewers tuned in to watch.”
“Here is some further footage from that two weeks of intense training,” a red-faced Caroline said, when cued by the production team. She would kill Jimmy after the show. She had specifically asked him to cut out that “high blood pressure” footage.
Now, on camera, Pemberley’s ballroom appeared, where a casually dressed Darcy met up with Elizabeth. He looked serious and pensive.
“Miss Bennet. How do you do, today?”
“Hi, Darcy. Why so formal? I’ve seen you frequently over the past eight weeks. Even if you won’t call me ‘honey,’ like George does, I’m sure you can do better than ‘Miss Bennet,’” Elizabeth replied teasingly.
She had also known Darcy socially for the last few weeks, as her sister Jane was dating his good friend and host, Charles. She had also learned about how he had mistreated George, regarding an inheritance from Darcy’s dad. George also said that Darcy was a playboy with a number of kept women. As a result of that, along with his remarks about her figure and her mom, she found him arrogant and conceited, and enjoyed taunting him, every opportunity she had.
“They may be filming us secretly now,” Darcy said.
“Why should you be afraid to get comfy with me in front of the camera? We have to dance a rumba together during the Finals. You know that the rumba is a sensual dance. It should be like making love with me in front of the camera, so you'd better get used to it.”
“I’m not very good at this – at being comfortable with women,” he said, and blushed.
“Really? Just imagine that I'm your lover number 18.”
“What?”
“Just something George said… That you had gotten comfy with quite a number of women.”
Darcy’s eyes shone with anger. He said coldly, “George is vulgar and a bad influence, Miss Bennet. I hope you haven't paid too much attention to what he’s said, and that you haven’t slept with him, as the gossip magazine claimed. I would also hope…”
Elizabeth grew angry, too, and suddenly pressed her body into a surprised Darcy. She wrapped her arms around him, positioned her hands on his butt and smacked him with force. “Okay, Mr. Gossip, let’s concentrate on our job. Here is Lesson One on how to touch your partner, rumba style,” she said archly.
The footage stopped and Caroline cried out, “Scandalous! No wonder some gossip magazines claimed that Miss Eliza was a …”
“Wow, Caroline,” Charles interrupted hastily, “do you think our sly producer has any more secret footage to
