Page 32 of Sweet Courage

Preston leaned forward, kissed the tip of his wife’s nose and softly asked, “You okay?”

She nodded at him, their gazes locking, and there it was. That thing all the Sweets had found. A love that seemed impenetrable and totally enviable to everyone else.

A sizzle sound mixed with gasps had her looking up just in time to see sparks fly and Hanson kick back from the frame and swing away from the sparks. Crap. No one said sparks were a concern. All she wanted was for Hanson to touch ground safely, Alice and the others off the Ferris wheel, and then go see for herself that Clint was going to be fine. She hoped.

The access panel was open. She could tell because his body had shifted—the lateral movement stopped, his weight settled differently on the frame, and both arms were working at something she couldn’t make out from the ground. His boots were planted on a crossbar, knees slightly bent, the posture of a man trusting his footing completely because his hands were occupied with something else entirely.

The crowd around her had gone church-quiet.

Rachel’s hand found hers again without looking. Kat didn’t squeeze back. She didn’t have the grip for it.

To work on whatever was jammed inside the hub, Hanson had to lean backward over open air. He braced his boots against a narrow lip of steel, trusting his body weight and the tension of the harness to hold him. She could see him pull something heavy from the gear bag slung over his shoulder. He needed both hands. He was entirely dependent on the grip of his boots and the nylon webbing of his safety gear.

Kat stopped breathing. Around her, the crowd seemed to sense the shift in danger. The murmurs died down. Hundreds of faces tilted upward, watching the solitary figure suspended against the sky.

Hanson raised both arms, driving whatever tool he held into the machinery.

His right arm moved. A deliberate turn. Then his left. She couldn’t see the tools from down here—just the shape of his arms working at the hub, the particular focus of a man doing something that required precision and couldn’t be hurried.

Then his right boot slipped.

It happened so fast that her mind registered it before her body did—the sudden drop, the jerk of the lanyard snapping taut, the hard crack of the safety line going rigid against the frame. He swung sideways. Both hands still up. Still holding whatever he was holding. Still not grabbing for the rail because his hands were full and dropping what was in them into the crowd forty feet below was not something Hanson Taylor was going to do.

The sound that came from the people around her was not a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was the sound of an entire crowd inhaling simultaneously and then producing nothing. Complete silence. The kind that had weight.

Five seconds.

She counted them. She would count them for the rest of her life.

His boots found the crossbar.

He didn’t look down. Didn’t pause. Didn’t shake out his hands or adjust his grip or do anything that acknowledged what had just happened to anyone watching from below. He just found the steel and went back to what he was doing as if the last few seconds hadn’t happened.

The exhale from the crowd was audible.

Kat’s legs felt like someone had removed the bones from them.

“Sweet mother,” Preston said, very quietly, to no one.

Nobody answered him.

Hanson’s arm moved again at the hub. Then stopped. He held position for a long moment—both hands still, body braced—and then one arm came free and extended outward, fist closed, thumb up.

The signal.

The teenage operator at the control panel looked up, nodded, and then the wheel shuddered, groaned, and thank the Lord, moved.

One slow rotation. Then another. The remaining gondolas began their descent in sequence, the wheel doing what it was built to do, each car coming around to the boarding platform in the unhurried rhythm. Alice’s gondola reached the platform and Preston was there before the bar lifted, his arms around his mother before her feet cleared the step, and Alice held on to her son for exactly three seconds before she stepped back and looked up at the frame where Hanson had begun to descend. Clip. Move. Clip. Coming down the same way he’d gone up. No faster, no slower, no drama in it. Just the deliberate rhythm of a man who had done what needed doing and was now completing the sequence.

Kat stood at the base of the frame, she didn’t take her eyes off him for a single second of the descent. Twenty feet. Ten. Then five and his boots hit the ground with a glorious thud.

The heavy thud of Hanson’s landing sent a sharp, residual ache through his right shoulder—a stark reminder of the lanyard catching his full body weight sixty feet in the air—but the pain was distant. Secondary. He stripped off his heavy leather work gloves, unclipped the harness, and let the nylon webbing fall away. He turned, and Kat was already there, slamming into him with desperate, trembling force.

There was no hesitation; he dropped the heavy gear bag into the dirt, and effortlessly folded his arms around her, tucking her tightly against his chest. Her arms locked around his neck as if she was afraid gravity might try to claim him again. Closing his eyes, he buried his face in her hair, anchoring her against his heart, he held her as tightly as he dared. Nothing had ever felt so right.

“You’re okay,” she muttered into his shoulder, her voice rapid and breathless, muffled by his shirt. “I thought… when you slipped, my heart stopped. It actually stopped, Hanson. I was so worried. Thank God you’re down and everyone’s okay.”

“I’m right here.” He pressed a long, solid kiss to the top of her head. “I’m not going anywhere. Promise.” For a long, quiet moment, they merely stood there in the dirt at the base of the massive steel wheel, holding each other close, letting the noise of the fairgrounds and the distant sirens wash completely over them. Then, a realization hit him. It started in his chest and expanded outward, bright and startlingly clear. Still holding her close, he pulled his head back just enough to rest his cheek against her temple. “Kat.”