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

Chapter 8

The fight raged through the night.

Men tried rushing the porch. Jeremiah met them with brute strength, swinging the butt of his rifle like a hammer, sending bodies flying. One man made it to the door and clawed at the frame—Dileia fired through a crack in the wood, and he fell back with a howl, his hand bloody.

They tried setting the walls alight, pressing torches against the dry timber. Dileia dragged buckets of water to douse the flames, her muscles screaming, her lungs burning with smoke. She moved on instinct, on fury, on the desperate need to protect what she had finally found.

When a bullet grazed Jeremiah’s arm, tearing through his sleeve and leaving a furrow of red, he didn’t even flinch. He wrapped it with a strip of cloth torn from his shirt and kept firing.

Dileia’s hands shook as she bandaged him in the brief lulls between volleys.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, her voice thin.

“I’ve had worse.”

“That’s not comforting.”

He almost smiled. “Didn’t mean it to be.”

—

Just before dawn, Crawford himself forced his way inside.

He had found a weak point—a window on the north side, where the shutter had been splintered by repeated shots. He crashed through in a shower of broken glass, his revolver drawn, his face twisted with rage and exhaustion.

“You’ll come with me, girl,” he snarled, his eyes fixed on Dileia. “Or I’ll kill your beast.”

Jeremiah stepped between them. Blood streaked his arm, dripping from his fingertips, but he stood unflinching, his massive frame a wall of raw defiance. His rifle was empty, he had no time to reload, but he stood anyway.

“You’ll touch her over my dead body.”

Crawford’s sneer widened. “So be it.”

He raised the revolver.

Time slowed.

Dileia saw the hammer pull back. She saw Jeremiah’s body shift, preparing to take the bullet, his arms spreading as if to shield her with his entire being. She saw Crawford’s finger tighten on the trigger, saw the tendon in his hand flex.

And then she saw herself—not the woman who had stood silent on that auction platform, head bowed, accepting the world’s cruelty. Not the expendable daughter, the unwanted sister, the fat joke of Copper Ridge.

A different woman. A woman who had learned to shoot. A woman who knew her worth. A woman who had found a man who saw strength where others saw only flesh.

She raised the shotgun.

The blast was deafening in the enclosed space. The sound bounced off the log walls, multiplied, became something immense.

Crawford staggered, his eyes wide with shock. The revolver slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor. He looked down at his chest, where red was spreading across his shirt, dark and relentless. Then up at Dileia.

She met his gaze without flinching.

He collapsed at her feet.

The world went silent. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Smoke curled upward, thick and acrid. The fire crackled in the hearth, indifferent.

Outside, the remaining men heard the shot. They waited. The silence stretched. Crawford didn’t emerge.

One by one, the torches went out, extinguished or dropped as the survivors fled into the trees. The sound of their retreat faded into the mountain’s vast quiet, swallowed by the pines and the snow.