Page 31 of Head Over Wheels

‘You have to keep them,’ I said firmly. ‘You raced a scorcher, Seb. You gave Derek the start of a lifetime. He’s never going to forget that race and neither should you.’

‘He’s a nice kid—’

I wasn’t finished. I tamped down that hot spike of pride and continued, ‘But you should have ditched him for the chance to win. You know you could have won it, right? You’rethere to support the team, but you have to grab the opportunities when they come.’

When he shook his head, I couldn’t hold in all the things I’d felt reading the race report on Saturday – especially when I’d read about that blasted spider.

‘If you’re so serious about quitting, you should be putting everything into your last season!’

‘I have been putting everything in! You know that – or Folklore did.’

‘I don’t mean hours in the saddle training. You were the stronger rider that day. You should have gone for the win. If that redback was for me, then it didn’t work. I would have told you to ditch him and go for it.’

His gaze clouded. ‘There’s no guarantee that I would have won. We had two riders on the podium. I’m sorry if third place wasn’t quite good enough.’

I resisted defending myself, kept silent about that pride that had swollen in my chest seeing the photo of him with that stupid bouquet.

‘Keep the flowers,’ I repeated. ‘And if you’re still feeling lucky, then give it everything this Saturday, knowing that you might do it.’

‘I can’t,’ he said and I wanted to clench my fists and shake him. ‘Because it’s not my luck anyway. It’s yours.’

I crossed my arms and stared at the ceiling. ‘You think having sex was some supernatural ritual where all my luck transferred to you? Was that why you started the thing with the spider? Am I some kind of lucky charm?’

‘No, no! I’m sorry about the spider. I shouldn’t have… I was thinking of you, that’s all. I wish Derek hadn’t copied me, blown it all out of proportion.’

I wished he hadn’t admitted he’d been thinking of me, with that soft hitch in his voice. Now I couldn’t even be mad about that.

He sighed. ‘I hate to see all this stuff happening to you. It should be you up on the podium.’

I scowled, hoping to hide the pricking behind my eyes. It was as if he could tell a little bit of me had resented his success while I’d seen nothing but failure for months. I’d been sick and in pain and there he was standing on a podium. Reason told me the two facts were entirely unrelated, but I’d still resented him, feeling like a horrible person as I did so.

‘Itwillbe me up on the podium soon enough – especially if you can’t get your head in the game. You’ll see on Saturday. It’s not my luck or your luck. It’s just luck – and skill and focus. I love this race and I’m going to attack it.’

He watched me silently for a long moment, a not-quite smile on his face and a light in his eyes. I realised with a start what he was thinking:Good luck for the race. You’re amazing.

If he said it, he couldn’t delete it again, the way he’d deleted that message. If he said it, I was going to kiss him. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

Chapter 13

Lori

He didn’t say it, the bastard – the wise, sensible bastard. He let me walk away without kissing him.

To make matters worse, he then showed his face at dinner – and breakfast the following day, as well as lunch and dinner. And he looked cute while he did it. Derek Sabel followed him around like a disciple and they joked and shoved each other and behaved like puppies instead of grown men – and it was unbearably sweet.

He kept meeting my eye – and then looking away and shaking himself as though he was trying not to.

The utter bastard. I couldn’t hate him. I couldn’t tune him out. By Saturday morning I was annoyed as hell – well, ‘annoyed’ was one way to describe it.

I waited for him to text me on Friday night before the race, but – nothing. The last thing I did before rolling over and forcing myself to go to sleep was send him aStar Trekgif with something about good luck, which was a low blow sincehe’d spent so long on Zpeed explaining to me that the fandoms were entirely separate and he was more into Chewbacca than Spock.

In addition to having no reply from Seb when I woke up, I looked in the mirror while brushing my teeth to see that one of my earrings had fallen out. You might not have expected that I wore earrings during races. I had never been a girly girl, or at all precious about my appearance – I couldn’t afford to be when I lived my life with helmet hair and sweated off all my make-up. In the second hole in my earlobe I wore lightning strikes. But I’d learned when I was 14 and one hole had closed up that I needed to keep something in. Mum had bought me a pair of platinum hoops that were small enough to wear all the time and I never took them out.

And now I’d lost one on the morning of a race.

It didn’t matter. Sure, I always put my right shoe on before my left on race day. I had my favourite socks and a lucky bra from a small Australian label, which was so difficult to replace in Europe that I kept a pristine spare in case I damaged one.

These were crutches to keep my head in the game and wouldn’t actually affect my race. But the earring freaked me out. After searching through my sheets and under the bed and examining the pillow with no results, I had to accept it was gone and decide whether to take out the other earring.

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