“Give Me The FAT One!” Mountain Man SAID After Being Offered 10 Mail-Order Brides

Chapter 3

The cabin appeared on the fourth day.

Dileia had expected a crude shack, the kind of dwelling that reeked of damp and loneliness—a beast’s den built by a man who had forgotten how to live among people. She had braced herself for rough-hewn logs and dirt floors, for a roof that leaked and a hearth that smoked.

What stood before her stopped her breath in her throat.

Massive pine timbers rose two stories high, their logs fitted with a precision that spoke not of brute force but of patient, loving labor. A steep roof pitched against heavy snows, smoke curling steadily from a stone chimney that had been laid with the care of a master mason. Wide windows caught the afternoon light, their glass clean and unbroken. A porch wrapped around the front, its railing carved with patterns—bear and eagle, pine and fern, each line cut by hand, each curve deliberate.

This was no shack. This was a *home*.

Dileia’s mouth parted. “You built this?”

Jeremiah tied off the wagon team, brushing sawdust from his hands. “Every beam. Every nail. Hammered myself.” A pause, as if he was weighing whether to say more. “Took me near twelve years.”

Inside, warmth struck her like a wave. The great stone hearth glowed with fire, a cast-iron kettle steaming gently on a hook. Animal skins and thick rugs softened the wooden floors—bear, deer, wolf, their pelts arranged not as trophies but as comfort. Shelves lined the walls, and Dileia blinked in surprise—they were filled not with hunting trophies or weapons, but with *books*. Hundreds of them. Medical journals. A worn atlas, its spine cracked from use. Shakespeare. A leather-bound collection of poetry with gilded edges. A volume on the medicinal properties of mountain herbs.

A long table stood beneath the window, sturdy and polished smooth by years of use. On it sat something that made Dileia’s heart stop.

A violin.

It gleamed in the firelight, rich wood aged to amber, its strings taut and waiting. Beside it lay a bow, the horsehair pristine, the frog inlaid with a sliver of mother-of-pearl.

She stared at it, unable to reconcile the image of this scarred, silent giant with the delicate instrument. A violin belonged in concert halls, in candlelit parlors, in the hands of men in fine suits—not here, not in a cabin at the edge of the world, not on the shelf of a man who was whispered about as half-wild, a man who could kill a bear with his bare hands.

But she said nothing. She was learning that Jeremiah Stone was a man of many silences, and she was beginning to understand that each silence held a story.

“You’ll sleep upstairs,” he said, leading her to a room with a wide feather bed, quilts folded neatly on top. A pitcher of fresh water waited on the nightstand, a clean cloth draped beside it. A vase of pine boughs stood in the window, green and fragrant, their needles catching the firelight.

“It’s yours.”

Dileia touched the quilt with trembling fingers. No one had ever prepared a space for her before. Back in Boston, she had been shoved into corners, told she took up too much room, her bed a pallet in the attic. Here, in this cabin at the top of the world, Jeremiah had given her a room bigger than anything she had ever known.

On the nightstand, beside the water pitcher, lay a small object wrapped in soft leather.

She unwrapped it in the privacy of her room that night, her fingers trembling. Inside was a wooden comb, carved by hand from dark walnut, polished until it gleamed like silk. The teeth were even, the spine curved to fit a palm. A pattern of tiny wildflowers had been etched along the top—delicate, painstaking work, each petal distinct, each leaf veined with tiny lines that must have taken hours to carve.

She pressed it to her chest and felt something crack open inside her.

—

The days that followed settled into a rhythm that felt, for the first time in Dileia’s life, like *peace*.

Jeremiah rose at dawn, splitting wood with a strength that sent echoes through the valley. The axe fell in a steady, hypnotic rhythm—*thunk, pause, thunk*—and Dileia woke to the sound of it, to the smell of pine resin sharp in the cold air. She would set water to boil, bake biscuits, and sometimes fry eggs when he returned from tending his traps.

When snow fell—and it did, even in late spring, dusting the peaks white—she swept the porch, humming old Irish ballads her mother had taught her. *The Lass of Aughrim. She Moved Through the Fair.* Songs her mother had sung while mending clothes, while stirring porridge, while dying slowly of the consumption that had turned her lungs to paper.

Jeremiah never asked her to stop humming. More than once, she caught him pausing at the door, listening, his axe held mid-swing, his head tilted as if her voice was stirring something long buried.

He taught her things. How to carry wood without straining her back—”Let your legs take the weight, not your spine.” How to sharpen a knife until it could cut silk. How to set a snare for rabbits—she wept the first time she caught one, the small body still warm in her hands, but she ate it that night without guilt, because hunger was a more honest teacher than sentiment.

Once, he showed her how to fire his rifle. Her hand shook on the stock, her fingers fumbling with the trigger. He stood behind her, his massive body a wall of warmth against the mountain cold, his hands—scarred and calloused, nails split from labor—covering hers. He adjusted her grip. He steadied her aim.

“Breathe,” he said, his voice low against her ear. “Then squeeze. Don’t jerk.”

The shot rang out, echoing off the mountain, startling a flock of birds from the pines. A tin can on a stump spun into the air and landed with a clatter.

Dileia laughed—a bright, startled sound she hadn’t heard from herself in years. She turned to find Jeremiah watching her, and for just a moment, the corner of his mouth twitched upward.

Almost a smile.