Three Cowboys

Paula Graves

WYATT

Chapter One

Serpentine, Texas, shivered under a gray December sky, a cold north wind blowing across the scrubby grassland and swaying the bare trees dotting the landscape around the fairgrounds on the southern edge of town. The Feria de la Navidad had been an annual festival since long before Elena Vargas was born, and she had a feeling it would be there long after she was gone. Some things seemed to hang on forever.

And some things, she thought blackly as she spotted her prey across the crowded market square, just won’t go away.

Her target on this blustery day wore a black Justin wool hat low over his dark eyes and a black Western shirt with an embroidered rose pattern across the shoulders. His boots were silver snakeskin and black leather, embellished at points with silver and turquoise.

El Pavón. The Peacock. He lived up to the name.

His real name was Tomás Sanchez, and he was one of Javier Calderón’s top lieutenants. Calderón’s cartel, Los Jaguares, had been tormenting towns across the Mexican border for the last seven years. For the last two years, they’d been bringing their ruthless brutality into Texas.

It had to stop.

Sanchez strutted across the square toward a couple of women swaying to the street band’s lively rendition of “La Rama.” He coaxed one into a dance in the middle of the square, drawing claps and smiles.

“Do you think they laugh because they like him? Or fear him?”

The low voice in her ear made Elena jump. She whipped around to face the gray-eyed cowboy who had slipped up behind her without a sound. “Go away, Sheriff.”

Wyatt McCabe’s dark eyebrows notched upward. “Feliz Navidad to you, too, Agent Vargas.”

She turned away, trying to pretend she didn’t know him. There was no way McCabe could blend in with the crowd in this part of town the way she could. “You’re blowing my cover, cowboy.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”

Damn. He’d heard. “I’m spending my vacation pretending to be a human being,” she covered lightly, although she knew Wyatt McCabe wouldn’t buy that excuse for a second.

“A human being keeping an eye on El Pavón?” He ignored her obvious attempt to distance herself from him, closing the gap between them. He held out a bag of freshly roasted pecans, the warm, nutty aroma reminding her she’d skipped breakfast that morning. “Nuts?”

“I’m trying to pretend you’re not here.” She clenched her fist to keep from grabbing a handful of pecans.

“You know how to make a man feel wanted.” His tone as dry as the north wind, he cocked his head to one side. “Your hair looks different.”

Her clenched fists tightened, this time to keep from self-consciously finger-combing her curls. Instead of her usual struggle to tame her unruly hair into the sleek, professional bob she wore on the job, she’d let her hair air dry after the shower this morning. She’d also skipped applying makeup, she realized with a grimace. She probably looked terrible.

Not that she cared how she looked to Wyatt McCabe. She squared her jaw. “If I let you tell me why you’re here, will you go away?”

“Morgan’s found out where Calderón is keeping Brittany.”

Elena tried not to react, but she couldn’t keep her gaze from straying to Wyatt’s face. “Where?”

His gaze swept the square. “Dance with me and I’ll tell you.”

“What?” He’d lost his mind.

“We’re the only folks here not dancing. Do you want to blend in or stick out like a sore thumb?” He folded the bag of pecans and stuffed it in the pocket of his jeans. Holding out his hand, he gave her a pointed look.

She took his hand and let him whirl her out into the square with the others. “Where is Calderón holding your sister?”

“Somewhere around Los Soldados, down near Malachi.”

She knew the place. “There’s nothing in Los Soldados but scrub grass and alpaca dung.”

“Well, that alpaca dung belongs to our friend Javier. Calderón owns majority interest in Rancho de Las Crías.”

She stopped pretending he wasn’t there. “What?”

“Yeah, came as a shock to me, too. The task force has been busting our tails trying to sniff out any business holdings Calderón has in the southwest and apparently the slimy cabrón has been shoveling alpaca droppings ten miles away for two years.”

“I doubt he does any of his own shoveling,” she muttered as he tugged her closer to avoid a collision with another dancing couple. As she leaned in to speak quietly in his ear, her cheek brushing against his, she felt the light bristle of his beard stubble and suppressed a shiver of attraction. “What makes you think he’s keeping Brittany there?”

“Morgan got the information out of one of our ranch hands who was working for Calderón.”

She leaned her head back to look up at him, struck by his bitter tone. “Got it out of him how?”

“Morgan has his ways,” Wyatt said flatly. Elena had a feeling some of Morgan’s ways of getting things done wouldn’t please her superiors at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Then again, ICE had made her take a three-week enforced vacation when she was hot on Calderón’s trail. They weren’t her favorite people at the moment.

“What are you going to do?” she asked Wyatt.

“Morgan, Bull and I went to Mexico earlier this week, but we got nowhere. Everybody’s terrified of Calderón. Nobody’s talking.” He pulled her back to him, resting his cheek against hers so he could lower his voice. Again, she felt a tremor of sexual awareness dart through her, as unstoppable as a south Texas flash flood. “But you know more about Calderón than anyone. It was criminal of ICE to tie your hands, which makes me wonder if Calderón has people in the San Antonio field office.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “Do you know something?”

“Just speculating.”

She was almost certain there was a mole at ICE, as Calderón constantly slipped through their fingers just as they got close to bringing him down. “What do you want?”

“I want to see your personal files. Maybe there’s information there we can use to open up some doors.”

She shook her head quickly. “Nobody sees my files. Not even ICE.”

His voice hardened. “Calderón has my sister, Vargas.”

“I don’t let people look at my files,” she said more quietly. “I have my reasons. But I’ll dig through them myself for every bit of information I’ve collected about Calderón’s movements along the border and see if there’s something we can exploit.”

She saw he wasn’t pleased with the compromise, but he gave a brief nod. His hand moved lightly against her back, tracking fire along her nerve endings. “I can be at your place by one. Will you be there?”

She looked across the square, where Sanchez had moved on to another pretty dance partner. Her stakeout here at the fair had been a desperation move anyway, she thought. If McCabe was right about the alpaca farm in Los Soldados, it could turn out to be a far more productive lead.

“I’ll be there,” she said.

He let her go and reached into his pocket, retrieving the bag of pecans. He put the rumpled paper sack in her hands. “Here. You look hungry.”

Before she could come up with a retort, he’d disappeared into the crowd, blending in far more easily than she’d expected.

She checked her watch. Only eleven-fifteen. The drive back to her house would take less than fifteen minutes, and thanks to McCabe, she now had a bag of pecans for lunch.

It might have been a desperation move, but she could stick with her surveillance of El Pavón a little while longer.

Better than waiting at home like a desperate spinster for the sexy cowboy to show up.

* * *

“THAT’S ALL SHE’D AGREE TO?” Morgan sounded disgusted.

“It’s more than I expected,” Wyatt answered quietly.

“I’ve met a few difficult women in my time,” his older brother Virgil muttered, “but your ICE queen tops them all.”

“ICE queen,” Wyatt repeated. “Cute. What are you, thirteen?”

“She’s in our way,” Morgan growled.

“She’d say we’re in hers.”

Both of his brothers turned to glare at him. “You’re taking her side on this?” Virgil asked, his demeanor reminding Wyatt of his nickname—Bull.

Turn him out in a rodeo arena with a wrangler on his back and he’d give you one hell of an eight-second ride, Wyatt thought, hiding a grin because he had a feeling Bull was in the mood to punch it right off his face. “I don’t think we are on opposite sides,” he answered his brother’s question, keeping his voice calm. He’d gotten good playing peacemaker over the years, first between his brothers and their father and later as a lawman.

“You trying to handle me?” Bull asked.

“No more than usual,” he shot back, grinning this time.

Bull’s belligerent look faded into a grin as well. “Clearly you’re not related to me. You’re entirely too diplomatic.”

“And you’re conveniently forgetting my adolescence,” Wyatt said with a laugh. “I know you and Morgan have a lot at stake here besides our sister. But try to see it from Agent Vargas’s point of view—”

“Look, Wyatt, I know you like the woman—”

“I value her insight. I think she’s a damned fine investigator. She’s courageous, determined—”

“Not to mention hot as a Texas summer,” Bull murmured. “Suppose that might have something to do with your admiration for her fine attributes?”

Wyatt shot Bull a withering look. “I’ll let y’all know what I find out.”

Morgan followed him to the door. “There’s a lot riding on what you can get out of her.”

“I know.” Wyatt kept his voice low, aware his father was two doors down in the study, within earshot. Justice McCabe’s uncharacteristic lethargy over the past few days had begun to worry Wyatt. Was the old man thinking about caving to Calderón’s demands?

Javier Calderón’s ransom for Brittany had been simple but devastating: if he wanted his daughter back alive, by midnight Christmas Eve, Justice was to sign a lease allowing Calderón to use the western valley, which included thousands of acres of prime pastureland, as a through-point for his trucks.

The valley provided the shortest, most accessible route between the border and I-10, the east-west interstate highway stretching across the country from California to Florida. And Wyatt and his father both knew very well that it wouldn’t be alpaca wool the trucks would be hauling.

Wyatt couldn’t let his father capitulate and turn the ranch into a drug highway. Not as his son—and not as the sheriff of Serpentine.

“Be careful,” Morgan said.

“I will be. You do the same. Keep Bull out of trouble.”

Morgan smiled at that, the expression a striking change from his usual grim seriousness. “I reckon Tracy may have more luck at that than I will,” he admitted quietly, referring to Serpentine school teacher Tracy Cobb, the pretty, tomboyish high school teacher who’d stolen their elder brother’s heart.

“Does Dakota keep you out of trouble?”

Morgan made a face. “She tries.”

“You think you could hang around Texas this time?” Wyatt asked. “It’s not right to expect Dakota to wait around while you disappear for months or years at a time.”

“I’ve been thinking about retiring, before I ever came here. Dakota and Cody are making the idea a lot more tempting.”

“Good. It’s time the McCabe brothers got to know each other again.” Wyatt held out his hand.

Morgan shook it. “Call if you need me.”

Wyatt found himself still thinking about his brothers as he neared Elena Vargas’s rented stucco bungalow in Eastside, a neighborhood situated on the eastern boundary of the Serpentine town limits. She’d been living in Serpentine for over a year now, preferring to rent in the area rather than make the six-hour round trip from San Antonio when most of her work these days was here on the border.

Wyatt couldn’t tell that she’d made many friends since she’d lived here, even though it was hard to remain a stranger in a town the size of Serpentine. She could be prickly, he supposed, trying to picture her the way other people did. The way his brothers obviously did.

She was a good investigator. A very smart woman. Resourceful and insightful. But she tended to hide all those good qualities behind a defensive streak as wide as the Rio Grande.

He parked his truck across the street, next to an empty land parcel full of scrub grass and weedy shrubs. A skinny-looking stray cat watched him with wary gold eyes from across the empty lot, streaking away the second Wyatt made a move toward his Stetson lying on the truck’s passenger seat.

He didn’t want to call this area blighted—a lot of hardworking, good-hearted people lived in Eastside—but the recent economic doldrums had hit the area particularly hard. Many of the people in Eastside were first-generation immigrants who’d come here, legally or illegally, to take advantage of the higher rates of pay in the U.S. But higher pay only mattered if there were jobs to be had, and with the shutdown of the chicken processing plant outside Serpentine, many of the laborer jobs had dried up.

Lack of money had given Javier Calderón and Los Jaguares a foothold in the area, Wyatt knew. But proof was difficult to come by. The people who might have information to share usually ended up dead or cowed into terrified submission by Los Jaguares and their ruthless threats and actions.

He suspected Elena had chosen this particular rental house, in this specific neighborhood, because of its volatility. She liked to be right in the thick of things, and Eastside qualified.

Her car, a compact blue Ford, sat under a narrow stucco carport on the left side of the bungalow, so she was home already, beating their one o’clock meeting time by a quarter hour. He wondered if she’d eaten the pecans or if she was still hungry enough for him to coax her out of the house to lunch.

It’s not a date, McCabe. No matter how pretty she’d looked today at the feria, with her dusky hair falling in unexpected soft curls and her expressive face free of cosmetics, making her look younger and more vulnerable than normal.

She’d hate that description, he thought with a half smile. Elena Vargas prided herself on her competence and strength.

He had just reached for the door handle of his truck when he noticed movement on the porch of the house next door to Elena’s. A woman and three young children were hurrying down the steps, the children holding hands and looking puzzled, while their mother appeared terrified.

She spotted Wyatt watching her and turned her face away quickly, looking ashamed.

He got out of the truck and approached her, but before he made it across the road, she had already shoved her children in the back of the rust-flecked station wagon parked at the curb, cranked the rattling engine and pulled away in a cloud of Texas dust.

Wyatt watched her go for a moment, then looked down the street for other signs of oddness. Three doors down, the sagging front door of a turquoise-colored clapboard house stood open, as if the occupants had left in a rush, forgetting to close the door behind them. As he watched, a man in a dark fleece hoodie came out of the next house down, talking with a raised voice and animated gestures to a gangly Hispanic teenager. Wyatt could only make out a word here or there, enough to glean that the man in the hoodie was trying to get the boy to leave the house.

“¡Vete, tonto!” the man in the hoodie shouted, turning away from the boy and running down the steps. He stutter-stepped at the sidewalk as he spotted Wyatt watching him. The hoodie covered most of his face, but not the jagged, white knife scars that traversed his copper-brown face like streets on a roadmap.

Memo Fuentes, Wyatt thought, shocked. Son of a—

Fuentes whirled around and started running up the road.

“Stop! Sheriff’s Department!” Wyatt shouted, starting to take chase.

But a deafening concussion split the air around him, a shockwave hurling him off his feet. He landed on his side ten feet away on the hard-packed dirt of the empty lot, his breath exploding from his lungs.

Gasping for air, he pushed himself to a sitting position and stared at the spot across the road where Elena Vargas’s stucco bungalow had stood.

There was almost nothing left but jagged timbers and rubble.