‘Cameron, you’d better come with me. You can pick your stuff up later.’
I see Cam’s cheeks go red. He’s struggling to keep his temper. I can tell because he has this tic that goes off in his cheek. It was the same when he was talking to her on the phone. She must really get his goat. ‘You’re making out that something has happened here when it absolutely hasn’t.’
She is taken back by Cam’s forcefulness.
‘Porscha. You’ve walked in and thrown accusations around. Threatened to sack me. Assumed that I’m incapable of acting responsibly and now you don’t trust me to keep my hands to myself?’
She is back-footed by him. Her mouth opens and closes. ‘Very well. Have it your way.’
She swivels on her high wedged sandals and marches back to her car. With a loud crunch of gravel and an angry roar of the engine, she drives off.
I’ve done nothing but encourage him to abandon his core values, his not-mixing-business-and-pleasure work ethic. And then there’s me violating his trust when he very clearly told me he is not quite ready to move on from his awful cheating girlfriend yet, and to top it all off, because of me, Porscha is threatening to ruin his career. Poor man. I must try not to make his life any worse than I already have.
Turning to each other, we let out a sigh of relief.
‘How do you feel about going into the villa? You can still back out, you know. I’ll ring her and let her know you want to go home.’
I look at his handsome face.
‘And I suppose they’ll get me on the first flight out tomorrow?’
He nods his head.
‘Is that what you want?’ I ask him. ‘For me to go home?’
I can barely breathe. Why am I putting him on the spot like this?
He doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘No.’
‘But if I don’t go, the only option is to go in the villa.’
‘Worst-case scenario is you don’t get voted off, and you win a hundred grand.’
‘Well, that sounds like a no-brainer,’ I say, trying to sound more cheerful about it. There’s zero chance of me ever winning. ‘Will I see you when I’m in there?’
‘Yes. I’ll be pretty much in and out the whole time. The issue is that we’d be on camera the whole time so… erm, even conversations would be difficult.’
‘If only there was a secret blind spot that no one but us knew about.’
Cam looks at me with a sparkle in his eye. I can see his mind whirring. ‘We’d need a code word.’
He takes my hand and leads me to the dining table. He clears stuff away, gets out a roll of paper and unfurls it. He shows me the blueprint of the villa, where the hidden cameras are, which walls are fake and turn into secret doors and, most importantly, how to switch off the microphone in the toilet while I’m in there. He swishes his finger over his iPad to give me a virtual tour of the villa.
‘Don’t touch anything in the villa kitchen, it’s all fake,’ he warns.
‘You’re kidding,’ I say. ‘Don’t the Islanders cook their own food?’
‘Nope. We cook lunch in a secret kitchen behind the false wall in the communal bedroom. It then gets delivered to them round the back of the villa. But we never show those bits. Too boring. Dinner is cooked at the production village and brought over.’
‘Tell me everything.’
‘The place is so big you could probably avoid everyone if you really needed to. That’s the pool obviously,’ he says, pointing out an Olympic-sized kidney-shaped pool on the map. ‘You have to remember to take your mic pack off or it’ll cost two hundred dollars to replace, and Porscha will personally come down and kick you up the fanny.’
Whaaaat?
Cam looks at my shocked face. ‘You don’t have that expression?’ He seems shocked that I am shocked. ‘So, anyway, that’s the Tree House over there for couples wanting to get intimate. Why anyone would want to climb up there is beyond me. We have four cameras up there and two microphones.’
‘How many cameras are there hidden around in total?’