The Return Of Chase Cordell. Linda Castle

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.

      Her heart quickened with hope. Maybe, just maybe, he was going to fling open the door to her room.

      Maybe Chase would open the door and stride in with the same bold confidence he had displayed that night in Ferrin County. Maybe he would envelop her in his strong arms, hold her close to that glistening expanse of chest and make sweet love to her. How she yearned to have him pour his heart out, to tell her how much he had missed her while he was gone, to reveal his inner feelings to her.

      But he didn’t.

      She heard his steps carry him one door farther down the hall, and into the room that had been hers for the past two years. A few moments after the bedroom door shut with a heavy thud, the uneven tempo of his footsteps began again. Her aching heart matched its lonely beat to the uneven stride of his limp.

      Major Chase Cordell sounded like a caged animal and Linese wondered if she had become his reluctant jailer.

      

      Chase watched Hezikiah Hershner from under his lashes. It was damnably hard trying to observe and learn, all the while acting as though he knew everything there was to know about the complicated process of setting print and running the big awkward press.

      Frustration rolled over him. Chase had only managed to remain idle today by using his recent wound as an excuse. Hershner was eager for Chase to resume his duty of getting the weekly newspaper out, almost as eager as the mayor and his cronies, but he suspected for entirely different reasons.

      After the meeting in the woods, after nearly wearing the polish off the hardwood floors in his bedroom, Chase had reached a decision. He had to find out what those men were threatening him with. Bile rose in his mouth each time he thought about the secret they held over him, and the gun and gold.

      Were they somehow connected? Or was he such a rogue that he’d left many terrible deeds behind when he went to war?

      Chase sighed and wondered which secret would undo him first: his lost memory or the grim and unrecollected act the mayor was holding over his head. He had to find a way of learning about the Gazette and his past, and he needed to do it before the mayor and his friends grew impatient and forced him into a corner.

      He got up and stretched. His hip ached from sitting, but he had hoped that just being in the newspaper office would jar some part of his mind. He had prayed that he might blink and find the last hellish weeks were no more than a nightmare.

      While he massaged his leg, he moved near untidy stacks of papers in the corner. He scanned them quickly and saw random dates scattered among the unordered piles.

      “These are back issues of the Gazette, yes?” he asked Hezikiah.

      The older man looked up and frowned. “Oh, yes. I’ve been meaning to put them in some kind of order, but I never have the time.”

      Chase picked up the top paper and read the headlines. It contained news of the skirmish that had ultimately led to his wounded hip and return home. Could reading the old papers shed some light on his own personal history? Hope sprang up inside his chest at the thought.

      “I’ll take them home.” Chase heard his own voice. “I’ll bring them back when I have them in order.”

      Hezikiah’s head snapped up. “Well, not that I’m turn ing down the offer to clean up the office, but I thought you might be anxious to start. The Gazette was your pride and joy before you left….”

      “Two years have changed me. I need a little time to get to know myself again.” Chase felt the irony and