Free Beloved Outcast by Pat Tracy

Idaho Territory or anywhere else. She was too attractive not to have a father, brother or husband watching over her. She was also too headstrong to be left to her own devices. Her present situation proved that. Good Lord, what if Windham had left a real hardened criminal locked up in the stockade? Victoria would have freed him and then been at the brute’s mercy.
    His scowl deepened. For her own good, she needed to learn that a lone woman couldn’t go traipsing across the country as she pleased. Logan realized his sense of outraged possessiveness was illogical. Yet he couldn’t seem to help himself.
    It had been this same sense of heretofore-unacknowledged protectiveness that resulted in his accepting Madison Earley as his ward. When a prospector showed up at the bank with the story that a white girl was living with the Shoshones, Logan had taken it upon himself to ride to Night Wolf’s camp and retrieve her. It had turned out that Madison’s mother had died a long time ago, and the child had been raised by her father, who’d been working a small gold claim.
    Bushwhackers had murdered the man for his small cache of gold dust. Night Wolf’s tribe had sheltered Madison fora while, but dearly her place was with her own people. Logan could easily have sent her to an orphanage in the East, yet something within him had balked at casting her adrift in the world.
    He shook his head. It was hard to believe he’d lived thirty years without knowing he had this lamentable streak of sentimentality coursing through his veins. It had been this same latent sense of caring, no doubt, that sent him to the fort to deliver Night Wolfs warning about the attack.
    And now he was saddled with a woman who cherished her collection of rare books more than she valued her own life. She was wrong if she thought he’d yielded to her insistence to keep them. Tonight, when she was asleep, he meant to lighten the load the oxen were struggling with to get over the next small rise. By the time they reached Trinity Falls, she would be lucky to have one book left.
    He leveled a hard glance at her. All right, maybe he would be selective. He’d let her keep Cooper’s ridiculously romantic yarn about the Mohicans. Louisa May Alcott was going to go, though. Little Women was a new novel and could be purchased at any bookshop.
    His dark mood was appeased by the knowledge that the domineering woman would ultimately be put in her place. Logan visualized their arrival in town. He could see Victoria marching him off to the sheriff’s office, all self-righteous and determined to have him get his just punishments. It would be a pleasure to watch the entirely too smug woman discover that her prisoner was none other than the acting mayor and the president of Trinity Falls’s largest bank, along with a dozen other financial institutions.
    He decided watching her eat crow would be the most satisfying thing he’d done in a long time. When the oxen seemed to hesitate cresting the next pine-covered slope, Logan reached for the whip to offer them a little encouragement.
    His thoughts turned from Victoria to their immediate destination, a small tributary feeding into the Ruby River.They should reach it before dark. Once there, he might believe they had a chance of making it to town alive. They would be in Night Wolfs domain, and that much closer to keeping their scalps.
    She’s not a complainer.
    Logan’s mind again filled itself with thoughts about Victoria Amory. One way or another, he decided, he’d find out why she’d left Boston and what she planned to do in Trinity Falls.
    Everything about her manner bespoke Eastern refinement.
    There wasn’t a single reason for her to be running loose in the Idaho Territory. He knew one thing for sure; she wouldn’t be looking for work at Jubilee Joe’s or any of the other saloons dotting Main Street.
    A grin caught him by surprise as he visualized the prim and proper Victoria Amory serving drinks at a local saloon. She’d