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

Chapter 5

The next morning, she asked about Mary.

They were sitting on the porch, watching the sun rise over the valley—a daily ritual that had grown between them without words, as natural as breathing. The air was crisp, the sky ablaze with orange and pink bleeding into blue. Down in the valley, mist clung to the river like gauze.

“Was she like me?” Dileia asked.

Jeremiah considered the question, his gray eyes distant, fixed on the horizon. “No. She was small. Quick. Always in motion, like she couldn’t stay still long enough for the world to catch her.”

Dileia felt a strange pang. The opposite of everything she was. She was slow, solid, rooted. She had never been quick or light. She had always been the one who stayed, who endured, who absorbed.

“But she had your fire,” he continued, and his voice softened, the way it only did when he spoke of Mary. “She’d argue with me about anything. Politics. Religion. The best way to skin a rabbit. She never backed down, never let me win just because I was bigger.”

He turned to look at her, and there was something new in his eyes—a warmth that hadn’t been there before, a crack in the stone.

“You remind me of that. The fire.”

Dileia looked down at her hands, rough now from work, the nails chipped, the palms calloused. Hands that had scrubbed floors and loaded rifles and kneaded bread. Hands that had been called fat and clumsy and useless.

“I don’t feel like I have fire,” she said quietly. “I feel like I’ve spent my whole life being cold.”

“Fire isn’t about feeling warm,” he said, his voice barely above a murmur. “It’s about not going out. And you haven’t gone out. Not once.”

—

Spring melted the deep snows of Thunder Peak, turning icy streams into torrents and filling the valleys with new life. Wildflowers erupted across the meadows—blue lupine, red paintbrush, yellow arnica—and the air filled with the hum of bees and the trill of birds.

Dileia learned to recognize the calls that nested in the pines—the chickadee’s two-note whistle, the raven’s rough croak, the thrush’s liquid song at dusk. She learned to read the weather in the movement of clouds across Thunder Peak: flat-bottomed clouds meant rain, high wisps meant wind, a halo around the moon meant snow. She learned that Jeremiah snored when he was truly exhausted, that he muttered in his sleep sometimes, words she couldn’t catch, words that sounded like names.

She learned that he kept a small grave marker on the ridge, carved from granite, with two names: MARY and THOMAS. She never visited it without asking him first. And when she did go, she always left a wildflower—a tiny gesture that he never acknowledged but that she knew he saw.

The wooden comb lived in her hair now, every day, a part of her.

One evening, as they sat on the porch watching a storm roll across the valley—purple clouds boiling with lightning, rain falling in sheets miles away—she asked him a question that had been building in her chest for weeks.

“Why haven’t you touched me?”

The words hung in the air, raw and vulnerable. She felt heat rise to her cheeks, but she didn’t take them back. She had spent her whole life being silent about what she wanted. She was done with silence.

Jeremiah was silent for a long moment. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of rain. When he spoke, his voice was careful, measured, as if he was choosing each word with the same precision he used to carve wood.

“I didn’t want you to think I brought you here for that.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Then what do you think?”

She turned to face him fully. The evening light caught the lines on his face, the scars, the gray in his beard. “I think you’re afraid.”

His jaw tightened. He didn’t deny it.

“I’m afraid too,” she continued, her voice steady despite the trembling in her hands. “I’m afraid that you don’t actually want me. That you chose me because I was the only one left, or because you needed someone to cook and clean, or because—”

“Stop.”

His voice was low, rough. He set down the cup of coffee he’d been holding and turned to face her fully, his eyes burning in the fading light.

“I chose you because when I looked at you, I saw someone who had been through hell and was still standing. I chose you because every other woman on that platform was afraid of this place, of this life, of *me*. But you—” He shook his head, his voice cracking. “You looked at me like you were trying to decide if I was worth trusting. Not like I was a monster. Like I was a *man*.”

His hand came up, hovering near her face, as if asking permission. The hesitation in his eyes was more vulnerable than any words he could have spoken.

“You think I don’t want you?” His voice cracked on the last word. “I’ve wanted to touch you since the third night, when you fell asleep by the fire and I had to stop myself from brushing the hair from your face. I’ve lain awake every night thinking about you. About your hands. About your voice. About the way you hum in the morning.”

Dileia’s breath caught. She leaned into his hand, her cheek pressing against his palm, her eyes never leaving his.

“Then don’t stop yourself,” she whispered.

His thumb traced her cheekbone, feather-light, as if he was memorizing the shape of her face. Then he leaned forward, and his lips met hers—gentle, questioning, as if he was afraid she would break.

She didn’t break.

She kissed him back, her hand rising to cup the back of his neck, pulling him closer. His arms wrapped around her, and the world narrowed to the warmth of his mouth, the roughness of his hands, the steady thunder of his heart against hers.

When they finally pulled apart, the storm had reached them. Rain began to fall, fat drops that drummed on the roof and soaked the porch. But neither of them moved to go inside.

“Stay,” he said, his forehead pressed against hers. “Stay with me.”

“As if I could leave,” she answered.