Pat Tracy - Beloved Outcast

“If I’m as bad as you think, I would have had my way with your delectable body, hacked you up with your own ax, roasted you over a vigorous fire and made a hot meal of your tender flesh.”

Her heart pounded. That he could envision such deviltry proved he was dangerous. All her sympathetic thoughts about him rose to reproach her. She’d been a fool to release him from the stockade. And a greater fool not to arm herself with a knife.

Logan flicked a quick glance at his traveling companion. Damnation, she was as white as a ghost. It infuriated him that his careless words, words intended to reassure her, could actually terrify her. He didn’t know who he was angrier at, himself for uttering such hogwash or her for being so gullible.

I should have been the one to cut the trees.

Her gentle comment cut through his thoughts. She’d been concerned about him. And he’d repaid her generosity with a nasty remark about raping, dismembering and cannibalizing her!

“You can start breathing again. I won’t hurt you.”

“I don’t need you to tell me to breathe.”

Her bravado sparked a tug of admiration. The woman might be scared, but she wasn’t going to let him know it. The best way to deal with her so that she didn’t run screaming into the forest was to establish a rapport with her. Which meant he would have to learn more about her. He had to foster a degree of trust in this Eastern woman, because both their lives might come down to her obeying his orders without question. But he knew she wasn’t ready to hear that he was the temporary mayor of Trinity Falls and owned a bank. She’d think he was lying and become even more difficult to deal with.

“Why are you traveling alone?”

“You don’t recall?”

Her vivid green eyes looked.bewildered and, he thought with repugnance, filled with pity. Hell, she was back to treating him like a half-wit.

“Recall what?”

“I—I already explained that the wagon master was unwilling to slow his pace. And remember my books? The ones you wanted to leave behind at the fort—that large wooden structure with the big gate?”

He gritted his teeth so hard that his already aching jaw shot new waves of pam through his skull. “I meant, why were you alone in the first place? Most women travel west with their parents or husbands.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Parents are the people who give birth and raise you. A husband is a man a woman marries when she’s ready to start a family. A family—”

“I get your message.” Flags of scarlet decorated her cheeks.

Satisfaction warmed him. It was time Miss Amory understood how it felt to be treated like a simpleton.

“And?” he prompted.

“And what?” she snapped.

Logan realized he wasn’t making much headway in establishing a bond of trust between them, but at least she didn’t look as if she were in imminent danger of fainting.

“Why are you traveling alone?”

“It didn’t start out that way.” Her vibrant green eyes looked into the distance. “I was to make the trip with another family. Their oldest son was going to manage the team. At the last moment, however, their plans changed.”

Her explanation told him little. “Why did you decide to leave your home in the first place?”

Victoria’s already flushed face turned a brighter shade of pink. Logan sensed his question had struck a deep chord.

She was lying. That caught him off guard. She didn’t look like the kind of woman to prevaricate about anything. “And your parents let you go?”

“They. accepted my decision.”

There were a lot of things she wasn’t telling him. He sensed that leaving home had been painful for her.

“And your husband?” He was baiting her now, and he knew it.

She puffed up like a furious little red-feathered bird.

“I do not have a husband.”

“Fiancé?”

“That is hardly any of your business, Mr. Youngblood.”

“Call me Logan,” he commanded softly. “I intend to call you Victoria. It’s only fair I allow you the same privilege.”

She blinked at him. She’d done that before when something he said surprised her. The very feminine gesture appeared to be her way of getting her bearings.

“How do you know my first name?”

“You must have written it in every book you own.”

“Oh.” She studied him gravely. “Under the circumstances, I suppose it would be foolish not to be on a firstname basis.”

Such a well-bred, reluctant concession.

He liked the way her lips shaped her words—so precisely, so daintily. They were inviting lips—shaped with delicate fullness. Despite her mouth’s soft beauty, she didn’t look like the kind of woman to invite a kiss. Instead, she projected a directness that dared a man to cross the boundaries she’d set.

He pulled his gaze from hers before he did something totally asinine, like find out how those delectable lips tasted.

“Well, Victoria, what’s your answer?”

“My—my answer?”

“Are you engaged, married or widowed?”

Has any man been able to break through that formidable facade of yours?

“Mr. Young—”

“Logan,” he corrected firmly.

“Logan, ours is strictly a temporary association, and as I stated before, there’s no reason for you to know whether or not there’s someone. special in my life.”

“When this is over, suppose a man shows up, claiming you belong to him, and he demands to know what happened between us?”

“First of all, no such person exists.” Exasperation laced her cultured voice. “Second, the only thing that’s going to happen is that we’re going to reach Trinity Falls alive.”

It was hard to accept that the woman next to him was bound to no man. It was obvious from her independent manner that she felt no need to justify her single state. He tried to guess her age, which was no easy accomplishment.

A frown scrunched her lips. Her delicately proportioned chin was thrust at a disapproving angle. Her lashes were a golden red, reflecting the same tawny highlights that burnished her bound hair. She might have been eighteen, but her bearing was that of someone older, maybe twenty-four or twenty-six.

He scowled. She had no business being on her own, in the 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 for a 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.