Maggie and the Law by Judith Stacey

Maggie Peyton is sharing a stagecoach with Sheriff Spence Harding when the stagecoach is stopped and they are both robbed. During their trek back to the closest town, Marlow, she tells him that she is in town to steal back a statue from the local museum of curiousities. She does this, however, not knowing that he is the town sheriff, so when she finds out, she feels humiliated. Even more humiliating is having to rely on his help to find food and lodging.

What she keeps to herself is that she is the responsible for the statue of the goddess being stolen. Even though Maggie has a university degree and is the daughter of a well-known professor of anthropology and archaeology, she was duped, and the statue, which her father had discovered on a dig, was stolen from their home. Now, she is determined to get it back before her father discovers it is missing.

Worse yet is that the statue has powers. It is of a well-known (to the people of the area where it was discovered anyway) love goddess, and anyone who touches it falls in love with the next person they touch. It was for precisely this reason that her father kept it in a hidden place, and as she interacts with the townspeople, she can see the influence of the statue everywhere she looks.

But Spence isn't going to let her steal the statue on his watch. Even as she gained his respect for carrying her many heavy books along with them after the stage robbery without complaint for miles, he isn't going to let Maggie turn thief. Not in his town. Strangely, he feels himself falling for her, especially after she breaks into the museum and they both end up handling the statue. But he refuses to jail her, and instead helps her get a job to support herself, and gives her a place to stay while she is in town. The statue stays in the jailhouse until the owner of the museum comes back from the trip he is on.

Spence feels he must keep Maggie safe, and he's upset when she finds one of the outlaws that robbed the stagecoach hiding in her barn and insists on feeding him and cleaning him up, feeling him to be no more than a boy who made some bad decisions in life.

But when the outlaws return for a little more loot and plunder, will Spence and the former boy outlaw be able to keep Maggie safe from the other outlaws? And will Spence be able to convince Maggie to stay with him and be his bride? Or will he lose her to the cold,lonely world of Acadamia that she has always inhabited?

Most of the monthly romances by Harlequin are fast reads, but this one was even faster than most of them. It's light and humorous, and features the statue of a love goddess that has the ability to bring people together and make them fall in love. Maggie feels that she is useless in Marlow, with her book learning not being applicable to kind of daily life that the people in Marlow must live, and she feels judged as useless by the people of the town.

But in the end, she finds that all her book learning makes her respected, and her stories of life on adventures with her father makes her loved and wanted by both the town's teacher and the children, and, after tangling with the statue, she finds herself falling in love with Spence. But is it the statue that has made them fall in love, or is it just true love? To learn that, you'll have to read the book yourself, which I heartily recommend.