“Give Me The FAT One!” Mountain Man SAID After Being Offered 10 Mail-Order Brides
Chapter 7
They prepared for what was coming.
Jeremiah showed her every corner of the cabin—the weak points in the walls, the best angles for firing, the places where the logs were thickest and the places where they were thinnest. He showed her where he kept the extra ammunition, the water buckets, the bandages.
“There’ll be gunfire,” he said, his voice flat and practical, a soldier briefing a comrade. “It’ll be loud. It’ll be confusing. You might get hurt.”
“I know.”
“You might have to do things you don’t want to do.”
“I know.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You could leave. I could take you down to Copper Ridge, put you on a stagecoach. You’d be safe.”
Dileia met his eyes without flinching. “I’m not leaving.”
“You don’t know what Crawford will—”
“I’m not leaving.”
His jaw tightened. He looked away, at the fire, at the windows, at the violin on its shelf—anywhere but at her. When he spoke again, his voice was rough.
“I can’t lose another person I love.”
The word hung in the air between them, unexpected and raw. *Love.* He hadn’t meant to say it. She could see it in the way his eyes widened, the way his breath caught.
She crossed to him and took his face in her hands.
“You won’t.”
—
The first shot came at dusk.
Dileia was setting bowls of stew on the table when the crack of a rifle split the quiet evening. A pane of glass shattered above the hearth, scattering shards into the fire, where they sizzled and popped.
Jeremiah was already moving—his hand closing around her arm, dragging her to the floor, his body covering hers. His voice was low but steady, a blade wrapped in velvet.
“They’re here.”
Crawford had come with six armed men. Their torches flickered in the growing dark as they circled the cabin like wolves, their boots crunching on the snow that had begun to fall. Big, silent flakes that swallowed sound and muffled the world.
“Stone!” Crawford’s voice cut through the dusk, oily and cruel. “Send the woman out. She belongs to Weatherbe’s company by law, and I’ve got the papers to prove it.”
Dileia could see them through the gap in the shutters—rough men with rifles and hungry eyes, their breath pluming in the cold air. Crawford stood at the front, a revolver in his hand, a smirk on his face that she could see even from this distance.
“We’ll take the silver too, of course. Consider it compensation for the trouble you’ve caused.”
Jeremiah chambered a round in his rifle, the metallic click loud in the sudden silence. He turned to look at Dileia, his gray eyes searching hers in the dim light.
He didn’t ask if she was ready. He didn’t ask if she was afraid.
He just looked at her, and she saw the question in his eyes: *Can I count on you?*
She answered by picking up the shotgun he had pressed into her hands days earlier and checking the load. Her fingers moved with practiced efficiency. She had learned. She was ready.
The siege began.
Gunfire cracked against the timber walls, the reports sharp and shocking in the mountain quiet. Bullets thudded into the logs, sending splinters flying. A lamp shattered, spilling oil across the floor. Jeremiah kicked it aside before it could catch.
He fired through narrow slits he had cut into the frame—every shot measured, every bullet finding its mark. A cry outside. A curse. The thud of a body hitting snow.
Dileia loaded shells with trembling but determined hands, her knuckles white with each click. *Breathe. Load. Pass. Breathe.* The rhythm became a prayer. The cabin filled with smoke, acrid and choking, burning her eyes and throat. Her ears rang with the concussive blasts until sound became meaningless.
Hours stretched like years.
Torches lit the snow outside, shadows writhing like living things. Crawford’s voice rose above the din, and when he spoke next, his words were aimed like daggers—calculated to wound.
“She’s not your wife, Stone! She’s merchandise! I’ll give her a fine bed in San Francisco—finer than you could ever give her on this frozen rock!”
Dileia’s heart surged with rage. For so long, she had believed those lies—that she was less than, unworthy, a burden. That her body was a mistake, a joke, something to be endured rather than desired.
Not anymore.
She stood at the window, raised the shotgun, and fired.
The blast scattered Crawford’s men, sending them diving for cover. One of them screamed—a high, thin sound that cut through the gunfire. Another dropped his torch, and the flame guttered in the snow, hissing and dying.
Jeremiah turned. His eyes met hers across the smoke-filled room, and in them she saw something she had never seen before: pride, blazing like the fire behind him.
“That’s my girl,” he said.