Cat
NEW on ebook for the first time with NEW author afterword.She’s in for the ride of her life.Her career is stuck in a rut.Her love life has been a tangle.But fortune favours the brave…When journalist Cat McCabe lands a job reporting on the Tour de France she’s confident it might give her stuttering career the boost it needs and provide a welcome distraction from a messy break-up. Or so she hopes.She quickly realizes Le Tour is not just all about the bikes. Large bulges, huge egos, lashings of Lycra and plenty of sexy shenanigans play their part and, soon enough, her own life starts to mirror the high peaks and perilous lows of the race as she battles for more than just a scoop.Whatever happens, it’s going to be the ride of her life.With sex, drugs, large bulges and larger egos, the soap opera that is the Tour de France unfolds, with Cat’s life frequently mirroring the peaks and perils of the race.
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FREYA NORTH
Cat
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
William Heinemann 1999
Copyright © Freya North 1999
Afterword © Freya North 2012
Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Source ISBN: 9780007462230
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007462247
Version: 2017-11-28
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
For Emma O’Reilly
Honest and true. And a great friend.
Table of Contents
Cat McCabe and the Tour De France
Jules Le Grand and Team Systeme Vipere
Rachel McEwen and Team Zucca Mv
Prologue Time Trial: Delaunay Le Beau, Saturday 3 July
Stage 1: Delaunay Le Beau-Rouen. 195 kilometres
Stage 2: Rouen-Vuillard. 260 kilometres
Stage 3: Vuillard-Plumelec. 225 kilometres
Stage 4: Plouay-Chardin. 248 kilometres
Stage 5: Nantes-Pradier. 210 kilometres
Stage 6: Pradier-Bordeaux. 215 kilometres
Stage 7: Computaparc - Individual Time Trial. 54.5 kilometres
Stage 8: Sauternes-Pau. 162 kilometres
Stage 9: Pau-Luchon. 196.5 kilometres
Stage 10: Luchon-Plateau de Boudin. 170 kilometres
Stage 11: Tarascon sur Ariège-Le Cap D’Arp. 221 kilometres
Stage 12: Frontignan La Peyrade-Daumier. 196 kilometres
Stage 13: Valadon-Grenoble. 186.5 kilometres
Stage 14: Grenoble-L’Alpe D’Huez. 189 kilometres
Stage 15: Vizille-Gilbertville. 204 kilometres
Stage 16: Gilbertville-Aix-les-Bains. 149 kilometres
Stage 17: Aix-les-Bains-Neuchâtel. 218.5 kilometres
Stage 18: La Chaux de Fonds-Lautrec. 242 kilometres
Repos: Transfer by road and rail. Lautrec-Disneyland-Paris
Stage 19: Disneyland Paris, Individual Time Trial: 63 kilometres
Stage 20: Disneyland-Paris. 149.5 kilometres
CAT McCABE AND THE TOUR DE FRANCE
‘I know that your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Django McCabe reasoned with his niece, ‘but you chasing through France after a bunch of boys on bikes – well, isn’t that taking the family tradition to new extremes?’
Cat McCabe, sunbathing, eyes closed, in her uncle’s Derbyshire garden, smiled.
It feels funny smiling with closed eyes; like you can’t really do both.
So she opened her eyes, stretched leisurely, sat up cross-legged, and picked blades of grass from her body, fingering the satisfying striations they had left on her skin.
‘Lashings of lycra!’ her elder sister Fen offered from her position under the pear tree.
‘Oily limbs a-plenty,’ connived her eldest sister Pip, suddenly cartwheeling into view.
Cat tried to look indignant but then grinned. ‘The Tour de France is the world’s most gruelling sporting event,’ she said defensively, hands on hips, to her audience. ‘It demands that its participants cycle 4,000 k in three weeks. At full speed. Up and over mountains most normal folk ski down. Day after day after day.’
‘And?’ said Django, rubbing his knees, bemoaning that the sun wasn’t doing for his arthritis what it did last year.
‘And?’ said Fen, an art historian who was much more turned on by bronze or marble renditions of Adonis than their pedal-turning doppelgangers her sister seemed so to admire.
‘And?’ said Pip courteously, more interested in perfecting her flikflaks across the lawn for her new act.
Cat McCabe regarded them sternly.
‘A Tour de France cyclist can have a lung capacity of around eight litres, a heart that can beat almost 200 times a minute at full pelt and then rest at a rate at which most people ought to be dead. They can climb five mountains in a row, descending them at up to 100 k per hour.’
‘Wow,’ said Fen with sisterly sarcasm, ‘I bet they’re really interesting people.’
‘Greg LeMond,’ countered Cat, ‘won the Tour de France in 1989 by eight seconds on the final day.’
‘Bully for him,’ Pip laughed, doing a handstand and wanting to practise her routine right the way through.
‘And that was two years after coming back from the brink of death when he was accidentally shot by his brother-in-law in a hunting accident.’
