My Outlaw

My Outlaw is a romance novel by the American writer Linda Lael Miller, published in 1997.

The mirror in the ballroom is the doorway and the problem: Keighly has grown up with the knowledge that a man who died before her grandmother was born is on the other side of the glass, and the novel sets that against the ordinary arrangements she has made for herself, including an engagement to a man she is fond of. The house comes with a history she has only half believed, and the man in the glass has been waiting on the other side of it for twenty years, so the decision she eventually has to make is less about romance than about which of two lives she is prepared to give up. Darby is a cowboy with a reputation and a temper, and the newspaper records Keighly has read about him say how his life is supposed to end, which gives the story a deadline as well as a tension between two centuries. Miller wrote a long list of romances set in the American West, and this one belongs to the subgenre in which a house, a photograph or a mirror lets a character cross over, so the period detail of the Nevada town is as much the subject as the couple.