Linda Castle - The Return Of Chase Cordell

He had met with them here—before he went to war.

The certainty of that past deed sent chills trailing down Chase’s spine. He knew if he did not tread carefully these men would learn his secret.

“I wasn’t sure I remembered how to get here.” Chase told them a sliver of truth and watched their reactions.

“Sure, Chase, whatever you say.” The mayor chuckled at what he thought was a joke. “Now tell us what you’re up to.”

Chase focused on the faces of the men. A dim memory appeared in his mind. For a brief flash, he saw them as he had seen the mayor in his forgotten past. And as he remembered them, a feeling of shame wended through him. The men were dark spectres of past sins. A sick feeling of guilt, or something much like it, twined its way through his belly.

At first there was Ira Goten’s mysterious pistol and the gold that Chase was sure was stained with blood. Now there were meetings in the woods with men whose politics he could not stomach.

What kind of man was I? Chase’s voice screamed inside his head. What horrible things did I do?

“Listen, Chase, Hershner has had too much leeway since you’ve been gone. The Gazette has been printing things we don’t like. When do you intend to take over and get it back on track?” The man who had been introduced today as Mr. Wallace, from the local merchants bank, stepped forward.

“What exactly is it you want me to do?” Chase felt his anger rising each minute he spent in the men’s presence. He didn’t like the way they acted or how they looked. Chase didn’t know if it was a memory or a premonition, but he knew these men were capable of his ruin.

“We want you to start printing the kind of information we want the people of Mainfield to have,” Wallace said.

There was a hint in those words that Chase could not ignore.

“You mean the kind of information you wanted printed before I left?” Chase bluffed again and prayed he had not said too much.

“Exactly. We’ve kept our word about your little secret and we wouldn’t want to think that you’ve changed your mind about our arrangement. There are dirty secrets, things that have happened you wouldn’t want people to know, especially that sweet little bride you brought home and surprised everybody with.” Wallace grinned.

Chase’s instinct for survival made him hold his fists at his side. He wanted to pummel them until all the murky suspicions they raised about his missing past were gone. But he could not. Whatever he had done in the past, it was his responsibility, his burden. He drew in a resolute breath and forced himself to stay calm. Chase acknowledged that he was faced with this situation because he had no idea what they held over him. He needed to pry information from them, he needed time to dig into his past.

“Mayor, I’ve just returned from war. Give me a little time to recover from my wounds before I undertake these heavy responsibilities.” Chase tried to relax, but it was a hollow attempt. He prayed the anger he felt was not mirrored in his face. The men looked at one another as if weighing Chase’s argument.

Finally Mr. Wallace turned toward Kerney. “I told you it would be fine. Chase Cordell is a man who stands by his word. He’s a man who’s true to his politics and his friends. We can count on him.”

Chase swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. If these men counted him as a friend, then he certainly hoped he didn’t run into any of his enemies.

Linese was sitting in the window seat of her new bed-room, staring at the silver-ringed moon overhead, when Chase suddenly appeared like a shadowy phantom at the edge of the thicket. She watched while he slid one of his hands through his thick hair. He only did that when he was stiff with anger, it was one of the little things she had learned about him before he left. She wondered where he had been, how he could have materialized at the edge of the woods, and why he seemed to be bristling with suppressed fury.

Chase leaned one palm against a gnarled mountain laurel and tipped his head up toward the night sky. His shirt was open and the long loose tail fluttered in an unseen breeze. Spring moonlight and the soft glow from the windows of Cordellane turned his hard, muscular chest into a work of art.

One strand of his tousled hair was touched by the breeze and he turned his head slightly. She saw the glint of violence in his eyes. He was dangerous, wild, and a bit improper. Memory flooded through her.

“Just like the night I met him,” Linese muttered.

Chase Cordell had come uninvited like so many other young men to the Ferrin County Presbyterian church. He had smelled of brandy and gunpowder, with a fresh wound on one hand. He had been a handsome, mysterious stranger that made the women, both married and unattached, whisper behind their fans while their pulses quickened at the very sight of him.

Linese had been one of those women. She had stood frozen to the floor as he came into the church. She had watched, mesmerized by his hard gray eyes, while he searched the room, as if he had been looking for someone. As if he had been looking for her.

When he pinned her with eyes as hard as rain-slicked granite, she had nearly swooned on the spot. He had continued to shock her by defying propriety and the codes they lived by. He had walked straight up to her and spoken boldly, without a proper introduction, without a care for the consequences. Linese’s heart had nearly hammered its way through her chest.

She had felt every eye in the room fasten on the tall man who none dared to question or oppose. He had been Lucifer fallen to earth, a beautiful archangel whose ember-hot attention had been focused on her alone.

It was the most stimulating experience Linese ever had, and it had not stopped there.

She unconsciously rubbed her ink-stained fingers against her throat and remembered the way his voice had rippled over her like a lover’s intimate caress. In those first shattering moments she had fallen completely under his spell.

But then what woman wouldn’t have? Any man with the confidence to stride across a crowded room and tell a perfect stranger she was going to be his wife was a man that few women could resist.

“Lord knows I couldn’t,” Linese whispered to herself.

She sighed and thought about it while she watched him below. Chase had simply told her that he had chosen her. He had never asked her what she wanted, he had simply told her how it would be, and she hadn’t been able to resist his will.

In the feverish two weeks that followed that meeting, as when they stood in front of the same Presbyterian minister, Linese had given her heart to him without asking for anything in return. Then, in a blur of activity, he had packed her up and moved her from Ferrin County. He had swept into her life like a blue norther.

She had waited, expecting him to tell her he felt the same way before he rode off to war. But he did not. Then she waited at her new home, Cordellane, for letters he would write home, expecting some declaration of affection, but it never came. Now as she stared down at the man who had given her his name, she began to wonder. Did Chase Cor-dell care for her at all? Had he ever, or had he simply chosen her for his wife for other reasons entirely?

She wrapped her arms around her ankles and rested her chin in the space between her knees. The fact that she was sitting in a bedroom all alone instead of sharing one with Chase, while she watched him through a cold pane of glass, was a hard truth to ignore.

While she swallowed the burning lump that constricted her throat, Chase leaned away from the tree and strode toward Cordellane. Linese listened for each of his uneven footfalls while he limped stiffly across the veranda and through the house. She heard him begin to climb the stairs, heard him pause on the landing.