Page 8 of Head Over Wheels

It was a miracle her eccentric Australia-based team Harper-Stacked had offered me a one-year contract when my agent had given up hope. A miracle I was here at all to embarrass myself as she studied me with her intent gaze, the one that sent heat shooting to my toes.

Ireallyhad to stop thinking about her. In a second, my heart rate would flip out and I wouldn’t be able to hold the position long enough.

Too late. My abs buckled and my legs hit the floor. Takinga moment to catch my breath, I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. So much for training hard. I couldn’t even keep up a hollow-hold for a minute.

It wasn’t only because I’d embarrassed myself in front of Lori that my thoughts seemed to settle on her and then hang like an overtaxed computer. I had great form in making an ass of myself in front of beautiful women who were out of my league.

No, it was the way my brain had mixed up Lori with Folklore – only because she’d seenMiss Congenialityrecently!

That film had come out when Lori was just a baby (yes, I’d googled her unrepentantly yesterday afternoon and discovered she was all of 25 years old –25!How was the film that old?) It had to be a coincidence, along with the similarity between her name and ‘Folklore’. My online training partner had chosen the handle because of Taylor Swift. It wasn’t anything to do with Lori’s full first name, Loredana – given by her Italian triathlete mother.

I grabbed a dumbbell and began a set of lunges, trying to screw my head on straight and not think about my banter with Folklore – and definitely not the way Lori’s fingers had brushed mine through the spokes of Colin’s bike. Under no circumstances could I start blending the two women in my feverish mind.

If shewereFolklore, at least I could stop worrying that she was bleeding out in a ditch somewhere – not that bleeding victims with their lives draining away usually took the time to delete their Zpeed accounts. No, she just hadn’t been intome and, while she could have been an adult and told me before bugging out, that was fair enough. She didn’t want a dork who was afraid of winning, whose best friend on training camp was a sex doll called Matilda – any more than Lori Gallagher would want me. I always gravitated towards unattainable relationships.

Another thing to add to the long list of reasons Lori Gallagher must think I was a loser: I was, in reality, a loser. My entire career was built around being a loser. I was a domestique – or équipier, the slightly less insulting term we used in French – the guy who paced the others, who helped the winners to save their strength for the final burst before caving and dropping back. My palmarès, my (very short) list of wins, was the result of chance and not strategy. I was a team guy and the Gallaghers were… not.

Had I really spent ten weeks training – way more than I usually did, I might add – with Lori Gallagher? She’d been funny and… nice to me. If I’d known it was her—

It couldn’t have been her. Christ, what was I thinking?

‘Morning, Frankie!’

I whirled so quickly I nearly clocked Colin Gallagher in the privates with the dumbbell. I’d never been called Frankie before, but I’d learned nicknames were a fact of life for Australians and, after the joke with Matilda, mine could definitely have been something worse.

‘Gallagher,’ I acknowledged, popping out my earbuds and summoning all my cool to cover the fact that I’d just been obsessing about his sister. He bypassed the chest press, givingMatilda a pat on the cheek, and settled at one of the leg-press machines.

My thoughts swerved back to the first day of camp, shooting down the mountain in Lori’s dust. When she’d attacked, she’d come alive, her plait swinging over her shoulder and her whole body rocking from side to side with the bike as she pedalled up out of the saddle. I could have waxed lyrical about that hole in her shorts and the ideas it gave me – some of them simply involving gentle antiseptic and my fingers. She’d knocked me sideways.

I hoped she won – everything she ever attempted.

‘What’s your strategy?’ Colin asked between leg presses.

‘Oh, I’m sure she doesn’t—’ I cut myself off with a gulp. Of course, Colin hadn’t meant my strategy for dealing with Lori and Folklore and my confused crush. I covered my faux pas with a grunt of effort during the next lunge. ‘Erm, I haven’t met with the directeur sportif. I don’t know which races we’re aiming for.’

‘What about your coach?’

The doors swished open again and of course it was her, just in time to hear the sorry truth. I forced my eyes off her, especially when I noticed she was wearing a crop top and her hair was in another high ponytail, brushing the back of her neck. It helped that she ignored me – well, it didn’t help my ego.

Colin Gallagher prompted me with a look.

‘I don’t have my own coach.’ I just muddled through following orders.

I remembered with a start that Lori and Colin’s coach was Tony Gallagher, their father, the Irish-Australian sprinter who’d dominated at the Olympics 30 years ago. Those were the genes – and discipline – passed down to the power siblings of Australian cycling, while I had only learned the discipline to get up and milk the goats every day and I hadn’t seen my own father in nearly 25 years.

Too self-conscious to move into the crunches that were next in my floor workout, I went down into a set of mountain climbers, feeling like an idiot for running on the floor, wondering if Lori was watching.

When she dropped down next to me, I nearly reared back like a cat faced with a cucumber. She was so close I could map the constellation of freckles on her arm and I swear I stopped breathing.

‘Out of shape from the off-season, Belgian soap?’ she asked conversationally as she held her body effortlessly in an elbow plank.

Actually, I’m in the shape of my life from training with someone an awful lot like you.‘I’m working on not peaking too early,’ I said instead, my mouth dry.

‘Is that what Matilda is for?’ she quipped through gritted teeth.

I nearly swallowed my tongue. Between laughing at her joke and the inability of my lungs to function when she was this close, the noise I made was more distressed donkey than articulate human.

‘No, I just,’ I began with a cough, ‘thought she’d be lonely.’

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