Three Cowboys Read online

  THIS CHRISTMAS, THE McCABE BROTHERS ARE COMING HOME TO TEXAS…

  VIRGIL by USA TODAY bestselling author Julie Miller

  Detective Virgil “Bull” McCabe hadn’t been back on the J-Bar-J Ranch in more than a decade. What he finds is his family in turmoil and his childhood friend, Tracy Cobb, all grown up…and more beautiful than ever.

  MORGAN by Dana Marton

  It took a lot to bring ex-soldier Morgan McCabe home. But when his brothers sent out a call for help, that was all the incentive he needed. Once there, though, it’s his former flame, Dakota Dayton, and her toddler son who might just convince him to stay.

  WYATT by Paula Graves

  Sheriff Wyatt McCabe has faced a lot of criminals, but none as ruthless as the one holding his sister hostage. Now, forced to work with Elena Vargas, Wyatt has to ensure his family’s safety without giving in to his burning attraction to the gorgeous agent.

  Praise for USA TODAY bestselling author Julie Miller

  “The 411 is that KCPD rocks and so does Miller.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Nanny 911

  “Miller’s characters are so well drawn they feel like family, and the book is the beginning of a new ongoing mystery, peppered with pitch-perfect dialogue, intriguing suspense and perfectly paired partners.”

  —RT Book Reviews on The Marine Next Door

  Praise for Dana Marton

  “Marton wraps up the ongoing Wind River County mystery with deft fingers, snappy dialogue and an adventure so tense it will knock readers off their feet.”

  —RT Book Reviews on The Black Sheep Sheik

  “Sassy, smart and sexy, with pitch-perfect action and two feisty, funny and dedicated agents, Spy is going to get three cheers from readers.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Last Spy Standing

  Praise for Paula Graves

  “As always, visiting the battling Cooper family is a real treat, and Graves folds in yet another tricky FBI chase and simmering romance, taking fans on a satisfying adventure.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Secret Hideout

  “Readers won’t be disappointed.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Secret Identity

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  JULIE MILLER attributes her passion for writing romance to all those fairy tales she read growing up, and to shyness. Encouragement from her family to write down all those feelings she couldn’t express became a love for the written word. She gets continued support from her fellow members of the Prairieland Romance Writers, where she serves as the resident “grammar goddess.” This USA TODAY bestselling and award-winning author and teacher has published several paranormal romances. Inspired by the likes of Agatha Christie and Encyclopedia Brown, Ms. Miller believes the only thing better than a good mystery is a good romance. Born and raised in Missouri, she now lives in Nebraska with her husband, son and smiling guard dog, Maxie. Write to Julie at P.O. Box 5162, Grand Island, NE 68802-5162.

  DANA MARTON is an author of more than a dozen fast-paced action-adventure romantic-suspense novels and a winner of a Daphne du Maurier Award of Excellence. She loves writing books of international intrigue, filled with dangerous plots that try her tough-as-nails heroes and the special women they fall in love with. Her books have been published in seven languages in eleven countries around the world. When not writing or reading, she loves to browse antiques shops and enjoys working in her sizable flower garden, where she searches for “bad” bugs with the skills of a superspy and vanquishes them with the agility of a commando soldier. Every day in her garden is a thriller. To find more information on her books, please visit www.danamarton.com. She loves to hear from her readers and can be reached via email at [email protected].

  PAULA GRAVES Alabama native Paula Graves wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America. Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.

  USA TODAY Bestselling Author

  Julie Miller

  Dana Marton

  Paula Graves

  Three Cowboys

  Contents

  Virgil

  Morgan

  Wyatt

  Julie Miller

  VIRGIL

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Virgil “Bull” McCabe—The second son of Justice McCabe. He’s as tough as his nickname. But this big-city detective left the family ranch he loved when his mother died and his father pushed him away. It would take a serious kind of trouble—and a special woman from his past—to convince this cowboy to come home.

  Tracy Cobb—The girl next door was Bull’s best friend growing up. But the tomboy he remembered is now the prettiest high-school teacher he’s ever seen. She’s on a mission to rescue a troubled student she’s taken under her wing—Bull’s little sister. Tracy’s stubborn determination could get her killed—but Bull is just as determined to keep her safe…and make her his.

  Brittany Means—The half sister the McCabe brothers hadn’t known they had.

  Justice McCabe—Bull’s estranged father. Wealthy rancher and self-made man. He runs his family the way he runs the J-Bar-J: he’s the boss.

  Julio Rivas—Another student missing from Miss Cobb’s class.

  Sol Garcia—Thug number one in the Los Jaguares drug cartel has the brains and a mean streak.

  Manny Ortiz—Thug number two in the Los Jaguares gang has the muscle. You’d think you would see him coming.

  Javier Calderón—Leader of the Los Jaguares cartel. He doesn’t care who gets hurt when he wants something.

  Morgan McCabe—Virgil’s older brother has spent years away on commando missions. Will the McCabes be able to track him down and bring him home to help out in this family emergency?

  Wyatt McCabe—Bull’s younger brother, the Serpentine, Texas, sheriff, will do anything it takes to help bring their sister home.

  For all my readers. Thank you!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Prologue

  “Amiga.” Brittany Means rubbed her cheek against the itchy burlap of her pillow and tried to reclaim the blank oblivion of sleep. But a swat on her bottom jolted her from her drowsy state.

  “Wake up!”

  She sat bolt upright on the crackling straw mattress. “Hey! What’s...?” Her stomach churned at the sudden movement and she leaned over the edge of the bed and retched onto the dirt floor. She nearly tumbled over the edge herself when her hands refused to move where she wanted them to. Brittany steadied the ball bearings ping-ponging through her skull before opening her eyes again. Straw mattress? Dirt floor? Her hands weren’t working because they were bound together at the wrists with several loops of gray duct tape. Alarm replaced the turbulence in her stomach as she awkwardly pushed herself back into a sitting position to face the black-haired man sitting at the foot of the bed. “What’s going on? Where am I?”

  “At the end of your little joy ride with my nephew.” The man’s Latin accent was thick, but his words were sharply articulate, his English perfect. He was a lot older than she, in his forties or fifties, probably. She supposed he was good-looking, the way somebody’s dad might be. But his black eyes were hard. And cold. This small room in the middle of nowhere had to be ninety-plus d
egrees and smelled of man sweat. But Brittany shivered at the chilling lack of compassion in the man’s dark eyes.

  What had happened to her? The last thing she remembered was speeding across the Mexican border just outside Serpentine, Texas, where she’d grown up. She and her impromptu date for the day, Julio Rivas, were delivering hay to his uncle’s alpaca ranch.

  Her life had been in absolute upheaval the past few months since her mother’s death. She’d had a blowup with the man who claimed to be her father that morning about staying home for Christmas break instead of going on a skiing trip with her friends at school. Brittany had jumped at the opportunity to cut classes and get to know the mysteriously aloof senior a little better. Feeling the wind in her long, dark blond hair, and snuggling up beside Julio’s bad-boy body had been the perfect antidote for the raging hurt bottled up inside her. They’d stopped for lunch. Julio had kissed her. And then...?

  She cursed at the big blank spot in her memory. Panic pumped her heart faster as she tugged against the duct tape and took in the adobe walls, wood beams and stone fireplace of the room. It was like one of the old kitchens she’d seen on a field trip to the Alamo in San Antonio. Only that room had been well-preserved in the name of history as students and tour guides filed past. This room was used and dirty and filled with several men—two big bruisers at the door, a man wearing enough silver and turquoise and cologne to tell her he thought he was a player and a couple more who wore guns on their belts and rifles strapped over their shoulders. There was one scruffy old guy who looked like he might be the only one who actually knew about alpacas and ranch life. And even he was armed. But there was no one her age here, and certainly no sign of Julio. If she was a bound prisoner, what had happened to him?

  The player in the black felt hat flashed a bright white smile and laughed. “The sedative has worn off and the muchacha is back with us now, patrón. I see it in her eyes—she is afraid.”

  That fear pricked goose bumps across her skin. Brittany pulled her gaze from his leering grin and turned to the man with the cold eyes who was clearly in charge of this gathering. “You’re Julio’s uncle?”

  “Many people call me that. Julio has a cousin who works for me. I am Javier Calderón.”

  Javier Calderón? Mexican-drug-lord Calderón? The-reason-she’d-been-warned-to-stay-out-of-certain-neighborhoods-in-Serpentine-after-dark Calderón? How did she...?

  She might have a wild streak and abandonment issues, but she was just a kid in high school. And she didn’t do drugs. This had to be a joke. Only, the duct tape and guns and raging headache left over from whatever they’d given her were no joke. “Where’s Julio?”

  “The boy does not matter. I sent him away yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” How long had she been here? Why couldn’t she shake this groggy lack of focus? “What do you want with me?”

  “A simple phone call.” Her bound wrists wouldn’t cooperate when Javier Calderón scooted across the bed and she tried to retreat. Rough hands saved her from falling, but pushed her forward while Calderón thrust a cell phone into her fingers. The number was already ringing. “Talk to your daddy. It’s time he started cooperating with us.”

  She was in trouble. Grounded for life kind of trouble. She’d-be-lucky-if-grounding-was-the-worst-thing-that-happened-to-her kind of trouble.

  “I want Julio,” she begged, as each ring of the phone counted down like a death knell in her hands.

  “We don’t care what you want.” Player boy, with all the shine on his clothes and hat, sank onto the bed behind her, his hand settling far too familiarly on her thigh, his body brushing against her back and blocking any chance of escape.

  But she was more afraid of the unblinking threat in Calderón’s cold, dark eyes. “Talk to your papa, amiga. Tell him you are my prisoner. Say exactly what I tell you to.”

  Brittany didn’t know whether to be mad at Julio for handing her over to these horrible men, or worried that the betrayal hadn’t been his fault—that he’d been drugged the way she must have been, or beaten up...or something worse. Calderón hadn’t said exactly where he’d sent Julio, or what condition he’d been in when he left.

  Out of desperation, her spine solidified with the stubbornness that had gotten her into a lot of trouble during her seventeen years. She didn’t know where that toughness came from, but she’d talked her way out of worse than this. Well, not really. But she wasn’t going to submit to their pawing and bullying without a fight. She tossed the phone to smack Pretty Boy’s offending hand away. “Don’t touch me!”

  The man laughed. “Ah, she is definitely Justice McCabe’s daughter.”

  Oh, how she loathed that name. Up until three months ago, Justice McCabe had simply been a wealthy rancher who raised cattle and horses on the outskirts of Serpentine. An old cuss whom people gossiped about and revered. He’d been a nebulous entity with a town library and a barn at the county fairgrounds named after him.

  And then the cancer took her mother and she’d learned the truth.

  She was Justice McCabe’s bastard daughter from some stupid affair. A child who’d never meant more to him than a monthly paycheck to support her mother.

  “Get with the program, amigo,” she mocked, her turbulent emotions getting the better of her common sense. “My father barely even knows me. I only live with him now because my mom died. She always told me my father was dead—until she realized I’d have no place else to go. I wish he was dead.”

  Calderón’s answer was frightening with his calm tone and precise movements. He picked up the phone and dialed the number again. “That was your mother’s choice, not his.”

  “Whatever. He doesn’t care about what happens to me. What if he doesn’t answer?”

  “Enough with your poor-little-me whining.” With the darting accuracy of a rattlesnake, he pinched her chin in a hard grasp and shoved the phone against her ear. “The only thing Justice McCabe values more than his land is his family. He will answer.”

  Chapter One

  Things never changed.

  At least here on the southern edge of Texas at the J-Bar-J ranch where Virgil “Bull” McCabe had grown up, they didn’t.

  Before pulling through the arching stone gate that marked the ranch’s entrance, he slowed his black pickup on the dusty gravel road to take a good look at the sprawling landscape, dotted with cacti and scrub pines, where he’d grown up. Somehow he’d thought ten years and 1300 miles would make a difference. But they hadn’t.

  His barrel-size chest expanded with a painful breath as he tapped on the brake and the memories came flooding back. All the hard work that he’d been a part of from boyhood to make an operation of this size a success—breaking and moving and birthing livestock, battling the elements, building and repairing fence lines. The connections he shared with his older brother, Morgan, and younger brother, Wyatt, the harsh criticisms and hurtful secrets that had forced them to stand as one. His mother’s tragic death.

  His father.

  That painful breath eased out on a wry laugh.

  His father had been keeping a doozy of a secret this time. This wasn’t just another affair he’d had while married to their mother. Justice had fathered a daughter. A girl who was now a teenager. Another casualty from Justice McCabe’s selfish, womanizing ways. And, as usual, Bull and his brothers had been called on to put a bandage on the wounds Justice’s choices inflicted on those around him.

  The gray limestone hills grew more rugged and rocky as they dropped off toward the Rio Grande River valley and its tributaries to the west. The land to the east, sectioned off by a network of irrigation canals, flattened out to succulent green pasture where hundreds of fat brown cattle and horses grazed. The gently sloping hills to the north led to a dammed-up reservoir and the neighboring Cobb ranch where he’d taken his horse on many rides to escape the arguments in the main house and stables. And behind him, about a mile to the south, was Mexico.

  Pulling off his sunglasses, Bull scrubbed his hand acro
ss the dark brown stubble that peppered his square jaw and peered through the windshield. The barren landscape where he stood taller than almost any tree was a stark contrast to the crowded streets and steel high-rises of the Chicago neighborhood where he worked as a detective. He tucked his fingers beneath the unbuttoned collar of his damp, white shirt and wished for the snow and cold and biting lake wind he’d left up north. Even in mid-December with the A/C on in his truck, he could feel the sun beating down on him and heating his emotions.

  This was a mistake. Why the hell had he let Wyatt talk him into this? He didn’t belong here anymore. Their father had made that painfully clear. The two of them had gotten into a shoving match out in the barn that day during spring break.

  “You’re gonna learn to do things my way, Bull McCabe. And if you don’t like my rules, you don’t have to stay.”

  He hadn’t.

  But now he was back. He’d traveled down here from the northern edge of the country in just over twenty-four hours. His muscles were stiff and his neck ached. He was beat. But he needed to shift his truck into Drive and finish the last half mile of his journey. Someone needed him.

  As Bull crossed through the gate, he recognized the familiar, two-story white house with its wraparound porch and pine-shingled roof. Framed by whitewashed barns and metal outbuildings, the house stood like a lonely beacon of civilization on the endless horizon of J-Bar-J land. This was Justice McCabe’s own little country, west of the Texas town of Serpentine.

  And Bull had stopped being a citizen there ten years earlier.

  He’d never envisioned himself coming back home to this place, to his father—he’d never wanted to.

  But the phone call from his brother Wyatt had him handing off cases and leaving early for his holiday vacation. “Bring your gun and your badge, Bull,” Wyatt had said. “We need to save her.”

  Bull didn’t intend to be here any longer than he had to be. Morgan, Virgil and Wyatt McCabe might have lost their beloved mother, Jeanne, to a traffic accident a decade ago, but she’d been dying inside long before that because of their father’s cheating. He’d be damned if he’d let another family member be hurt because of his father—even a sister he never knew they had.