Leadout
The perfect place to start The Grupetto - and to fall in love with Sastrugi Racing, the underdog American ProTeam chasing a Grand Tour wildcard invitation across one complete race season. Fabien Lacroix, thirty-six, has given professional cycling sixteen seasons and a left knee that's been whispering soon for two years. A French domestique - the sport's invisible servant, the man who does the wind work so other men can raise their arms - he's never been the fastest or the strongest. He's been there. And now his contract says final. This spring classics campaign is the last one he'll ever ride, and his directeur sportif has handed him a job title that sounds like an epitaph: leadout man for the kid. Dominic Yates, twenty-four, is American sunshine with eleven domestic wins, a brand-new ProTeam salary, and green eyes that haven't yet learned what the sport can take from you. Everybody says Fabien is going to teach him how to win in Europe. Nobody has mentioned that Dominic intends to make the old man work for it. On the second day of the January training camp in Tucson, the kid attacks an interval he has no business attacking - and Fabien, sixteen seasons of restraint notwithstanding, chases him. And laughs. On a bike. For the first time in years. The assignment is the engine of the whole spring: Fabien has one season to turn Dominic into the winner who can carry Sastrugi's wildcard case, and the most precise partnership in the peloton is becoming the thing they can't afford to name. Not because two riders falling in love is forbidden - but because cycling journalist Colin Rafferty is already circling, the wildcard committee reads everything, and Dominic deserves to be a story for winning, not for who shares his hotel room. So the leadout stays off the record: the shared hotel roof under desert stars, the bike fit where Fabien's hands linger a degree too long, the look across the team launch that both of them feel in their throats. Fabien is trying to endure his last season with dignity. Dominic is trying to prove he belongs at the sharp end of a European sprint. Neither of them planned on the other - and the one thing the veteran can't outrun, even at sixty kilometers an hour, is that some partnerships are precise because they're personal. Leadout is the first book of The Grupetto: a grumpy/sunshine, age-gap, teammates-to-lovers MM romance set inside the working world of professional cycling - team buses and feed zones, cobbles and leadout trains, a failing knee and a final spring. Guaranteed happily-ever-after, no cliffhanger.
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