Three Cowboys

Chapter Two

Bull heard the scrape of boots on the concrete behind him the second Tracy’s odd reply registered. Bull spun around to see a trash can hurtling toward him.

“Vamos! Policía!”

Knowing Tracy was standing right behind him, Bull stood his ground and absorbed the brunt of the heavy plastic projectile with his shoulder. Paper and bottles and who knew what else flew through the air as he knocked the can out of his way and squared off against a second Hispanic man. This one, just as big as he was, charged through the debris.

With no time to do more than react, Bull absorbed the attack like an offensive lineman guarding the quarterback. He hit the ground hard, losing his hat as he dodged a punch and rolled the muscleman beneath him. “Tracy!”

“Mintió a mi.” The dealer, smaller in stature than his compadre, but no less violent, shoved her to the pavement and ran.

“I didn’t lie. I need your help. Stop!” Tracy scrambled to her feet and latched on to the dealer’s jacket.

But the bastard swung around and backhanded her across the face, freeing himself.

“Tracy!” Bull shouted. He pushed himself up. “Trace—!” His attacker seized the advantage and looped a stout arm around Bull’s neck.

“Don’t leave! He’s not with me. I just want to talk. Please!”

Ah, hell. She was chasing after the guy with the gun.

Enough.

Bull needed to end this mess before this guy strangled him unconscious or he was too beat up to protect her. Making his own advantage, Bull threw himself against the bricks, slamming the guy on his back up against the wall and loosening his hold enough to ram an elbow up into his gut. A second elbow to the face popped his attacker’s nose, and the man finally let go, muttering all kinds of curses in Spanish.

“Sol!” Cradling his battered face, the man dropped to his knees and shouted for help.

“Manny?” The dealer in black leather reappeared, this time swinging a long stiletto. Stepping between Tracy and the knife, Bull raised his forearm to deflect the blow and was rewarded with a stinging brand of fire cutting through his sleeve and into his skin. “Who are you?” the man muttered in a thick accent, raising his knife again. “Why are you in my business?”

“Sol! Vamos!” Broken-nose guy dragged his friend out of the alley, pushing aside a young couple as they ran into the street.

The two thugs jumped into a double-parked car and sped away, scattering shrieking pedestrians as they careened through the crosswalk and disappeared into the night.

“Wait!”

Tracy darted around Bull’s shoulder and chased them all the way to the corner before he could catch her by the arm and pull her back to the curb out of the path of a car screeching its brakes. “Tracy!”

While she waved an apology to the driver cursing her, Bull cinched his arm around her waist and lifted her onto the sidewalk, pulling her several steps out of the path of danger, and away from the curious glances and outright stares of the people around them.

“Well, that went real well.” Tracy turned in Bull’s grasp and nudged him back a step. His hands settled at the nip of her waist, lightly holding on when she would have pushed him completely out of the way so she could get a glimpse of where the dealer’s car had gone. “Maybe they thought I was up to something when you showed up.” Finally understanding that Bull wasn’t going to let her loose to go after them again, she pulled open the front of his jacket and breathed out a heavy sigh of disappointment. “You’re wearing your badge, aren’t you?” She made a face at the gun and holster beneath his arm and quickly smoothed the jacket back into place. “They probably thought I was a cop, too. Or an informant or bait or whatever—”

“Tracy Cobb?” Bull repeated, the raw wound on his arm burning, his chest heaving to even out his breathing, his brain trying to wrap itself around the idea of seeing the classmate who’d lived on the ranch next to his all grown up. And hot. And meeting in an alley with two armed thugs. “Trace—”

She tilted her chin up to chide him. “If all you say is my name one more time, I’m going to smack you.”

Bull grinned. At last, something he recognized—a friend half his size who wasn’t afraid to tease him.

“Been beat up enough for one night already, thanks.” Risking that she wouldn’t bolt after their two attackers again, Bull let go to run his hands up and down her arms, feeling soft cotton and firm muscle underneath, checking for any sign of injury. He touched her chin and angled it up to the corner streetlight to get a better look at the puffy mark on her cheek where the man called Sol had struck her. “Are you all right?”

She brushed aside a chestnut tendril that had blown across her face and tucked it back into her ponytail. “I’m not hurt.”

But something was wrong. A tiny frown marred the smooth skin of her forehead.

“Why are you buying drugs?” he asked.

She propped her hands on her hips, and tipped those true blue eyes up to his. “How else am I supposed to meet a drug dealer?”

Matching her stance, Bull blinked twice, three times, still trying to make sense of this unexpected reunion. Tracy’s eyes couldn’t be that intensely clear if she was using, so, “What’s going on? What the hell are you doing messing with guys like that? They both carried guns, and they knew how to fight.”

“Of course they would. They’re members of the Del Rey de los Jaguares.”

“King of the Jaguars,” he translated. Wait a minute. Drug cartel? Dealer? Enforcer? “How do you know thugs like that?” He cupped his hands over her shoulders and shook his head. “Sorry. Could we start this conversation over again?”

“Oh, Bull. You’re hurt.” With his arm in her line of sight, it was impossible to miss the sticky crimson staining the light gray sleeve of his jacket. She gently cradled his forearm between them with one hand, and started patting at the pockets of his jacket and jeans, probably searching for the bandanna she’d always known him to carry.

“Back pocket,” he told her, reading her intention the way he’d once been able to. He liked the familiarity of her palming his backside to retrieve the dark blue cloth about as much as it surprised him to notice that he liked having her confident hands on him. The way a woman touched a man. Not the way two buddies who’d grown up together and shared each other’s secrets made contact with each other. The bustle and noise of the music, people and traffic around them drifted outside the bubble of awareness that seemed to be drawing Bull closer and closer to the pretty tomboy and her tender ministrations.

What the heck was that about? This trip home to Texas was all out of whack. Justice playing with little kids and throwing out apologies? Tracy Cobb looking all pretty and feminine and like somebody he wanted to kiss?

She helped him shrug off his jacket and roll up his shirtsleeve so she could get a better look at the cut on his forearm. “I think you were bleeding the last time I saw you.” She wadded up the bandanna and gently pressed the cotton against the three-inch long gash. “You’re current on your tetanus shots, aren’t you? What brings you back to Serpentine? After ten years, I figured I was never going to see you again. Are you home for the holidays?”

Ah, hell. She was being all friendly and tender just to distract him from the questions he’d asked.

“Uh-uh.” Bull pulled away and brushed that wayward tendril of hair away from the freckles on her cheek. “We aren’t pretending like something scary didn’t just happen.”

She knew he was onto her ploy now. Her touch and tone were more efficient nurse than tender lover when she grabbed his wrist and held it up to slow the bleeding. “It’s a long story.”

“Ow.” He winced at the pressure on his cut. “I imagine so. But I want to hear it.”

“Sorry.” A sigh of confusion that must match his own lifted her shoulders. “Sounds like old times...you and me talking.”

There was nothing old or familiar about the purely male interest and protective concern she’d stirred up inside him. But he did know how to be a cop and elicit answers when he needed them. If he shared some information, the witness or suspect he was interrogating was more likely to share something, too.

She was tying the bandanna around the wound when they both blurted out in unison.

“I’ve got a sister.”

“It’s about your sister.”

Bull dipped his head, demanding an explanation. “You know about Brittany?”

“I’m a high school English teacher now. Brittany’s a student of mine. She’s been missing for three days. It’s not unusual for some of the more troublesome kids to skip school the last day or two before a break. But she’s not a problem student—at least not for me.” Tracy finished tying off the square knot before meeting his searching gaze. “She’s run away in the past—Brittany really rebelled when her mom died and she found out Justice was her father. Turned up at my place once. She needed a place to chill out and talk before I drove her back to the J-Bar-J.”

“So you’re a teacher now? You face down those teenage terrors we once were?”

“We weren’t so bad. And neither is Brittany. I think she’s just a confused, heartbroken girl. But she’s never run away for this long before, and I’m worried. There are a few other kids the truant officer hasn’t been able to track down yet, but I didn’t think she ran with those...” An alarm went off in those clear blue eyes. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, something has happened to her.” Tight fingers curled into the sleeve of his shirt and the muscles underneath. “Bull? Is Brittany okay?”

This was no place to have this conversation. Once again aware of all the curious glances and potential eavesdroppers around them outside of Margarita’s, Bull flipped his slashed jacket over his shoulder and took Tracy by the arm. He nodded toward the bar’s flashing entryway. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She twisted around in front of him, stopping him with a palm at the center of his chest. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. Brittany and I were close. I worked with her at school. She had a real talent for writing and needed an adult she could trust. What’s happened to her?”

He covered her hand with his own and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Better make that drink coffee. Someplace private.”

* * *

“KIDNAPPED?” TRACY UNLOCKED the door to her apartment and ushered Bull into the kitchen. “I knew it wasn’t good for her to miss three days of school. Wyatt gave me the standard departmental line of ‘I’ll look into it,’ when I reported her missing, and Justice wouldn’t return my phone calls. So I was trying to buy information about your sister. Or any of the other missing students. I figured if anyone knows about the bad things that go on here in Serpentine, the Los Jaguares would.”

“Your logic was good. As a cop, I probably would have done the same thing.” She pulled out a stool at the eating peninsula and pushed him onto the padded seat. She took his bloodied coat and the black hat they’d retrieved from the alley and hooked them over the back of a kitchen chair. When she moved past him to get some clean towels and a first-aid kit, he caught her hand and pulled her back to face him. “Still, that was a pretty dangerous thing to do. Men like that, they don’t like people poking around in their business. And back in that alley, away from any witnesses...? I hate to think of what could have happened.”

Bracing her hand against his knee to keep herself from walking all the way into that broad, strong chest, Tracy summoned a smile she wasn’t feeling. “You were always there for me when I needed you, Bull.”

“Likewise.” He angled his square face and gently brushed his fingertips over her bruised cheek. “Better get some ice for that while you’re doctoring me up, too.”

Adrenaline was quickly ebbing from her system, and the full realization of the danger she’d been in—and the danger her young friend Brittany was facing—gave her knees an embarrassing wobble, and the temptation to let Bull wrap all that strength around her was almost more than she could stand. But she and Bull were just friends—he’d made that clear when he’d left Texas. And no amount of wishing and wanting their relationship to be something more had ever once made him call or write or come back home.

Understanding that she needed to rely on her own strength, Tracy pulled away while she still could. “So how is Justice handling this? He and Brittany were still in the process of getting to know each other.”

She heard Bull’s deep sigh when she went to the sink to wash her hands and gather what she needed. “How do you think? He’s Justice McCabe. He’s not going to bow down to any drug cartel. It’s all about his reputation and his precious code of right and wrong. To hell with whoever gets hurt. His own daughter. You.”

“Shame on you, Bull.” She leaned her hip against the counter as she dried her hands and looked across the room to those eyes that were as dark and unflinching as the gray limestone rock that studded the rugged ranch land where they’d grown up. His relationship with his father had always been a sensitive subject. But he’d been gone ten years. “You don’t think he’s worried sick about Brittany? You don’t think he’s regretted every day that you and Morgan have been gone? I’ll give you that his pride makes for a pretty thick skin. It hides a lot. Your father isn’t the same man he was when you left. He’s not as hard. He’s not as...indomitable as he used to be.”

“Indomitable?” The wry sound he made wasn’t quite a laugh. “You really are an English teacher, aren’t you.”

She wasn’t going to let him change the subject any more than he’d let her avoid explaining the desperate stunt she’d pulled outside Margarita’s tonight. “Justice has lost a lot of the people he cared about—your mother, Morgan. You. And he’s not as young as he used to be. He’s feeling his mortality, regretting the mistakes he made. I think he was...is...working to create a relationship with Brittany.”

“Do better with his second family than he did with his first?”

Tracy knew that sarcasm was a thin veil for the pain he was feeling. Tossing the towel aside, she went back to Bull and cupped the sides of his face, wanting him to see the sincerity in her own. “Don’t let the bitterness you feel toward Justice dictate all the choices you make. You need to find a way to forgive him, Virgil. Or it’ll eat you up inside until there’s nothing left.” She smiled to take the sting out of her words. “And who’ll come to my rescue if that happens?”

“Virgil, hmm?” His voice had dropped to a husky tone that vibrated from deep in his throat. He turned his face between her hands and pressed a kiss into her palm. Dots of tobacco-brown beard stubble tickled her fingertips, but his warm, firm lips gently soothed. Tracy’s breath lodged in her chest at the sensations dancing across her sensitive skin. It was just a friendly kiss—spur-of-the-moment gratitude or teasing, perhaps.

But it didn’t feel like a friendly kiss. It felt like...more.

Something about standing here in the shadows of her apartment, seeing those gray eyes locked onto hers, absorbing his abundant heat, feeling his lips on her skin, felt sensual, intimate. His deep-pitched whisper feathered against her eardrums like a husky caress, intensifying the hypnotic effect. “You know, there’s only one other person who ever got to call me that.”

She knew how dearly he’d loved his mother. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“No. You call me Virgil.” He pulled her in between his knees and hugged her tight. His arms wound around her back and waist. Her toes left the floor. Tracy nestled her cheek against the sandpapery warmth of his neck and held on. Her body softened against the harder planes of his. She soaked up the heat emanating from his arms and chest. Her nose filled with the musky scent of the long, warm day that clung to his skin. Old memories resurfaced as every nerve ending awakened.

Virgil McCabe was bigger, more mature, more masculine—more everything than the boy she remembered. And that only made the schoolgirl crush she’d once had on him blossom into something more. She tightened her arms around his neck and whispered against his skin. “I’ve missed you, Virgil.”

“I missed you, too. Coming home was about what I expected—conversations would be awkward, feelings would get hurt—I knew there’d be no reason to stay once the job of finding Brittany was done. But this is the first thing that’s felt right since I’ve been here.” He pulled back a few inches, letting her feet settle to the floor. He brushed aside one of those independent locks of hair that refused to do her bidding, stroking her cheek and the shell of her ear as he tucked it into place. His probing gaze studied the line of blushing heat created by his touch. And then his gaze dropped to her lips, making them feverish with anticipation for his touch, too. But just as Tracy began to lean toward temptation ever so slightly, Bull retreated. He twisted her in his grasp and pushed her back a step, frowning as he untucked the side of her blouse and pulled it up between them to show her the seeping spot of blood staining the flowered cotton. “Oh, man. Sorry. I got some on your blouse. You’d better bandage me up before I bleed all over your apartment.”

“Right. Um...” Say something clever. Laugh this off. She was the only one feeling the magic here. “Right.”

As embarrassed by her sudden lapse of eloquence as she was by nearly throwing herself at an old friend, Tracy ran into the kitchen to get the first-aid supplies. Without another word and only fleeting eye contact, she got busy untying the blood-soaked bandanna and cleaning the cut on Bull’s arm. She’d finally pulled her act together by the time she was winding an elastic bandage around the middle of his forearm to anchor the medicated gauze pad into place. She could even manage a teasing remark. “It doesn’t look too deep. Probably still wouldn’t hurt to have a doctor look at it. Bet it leaves a nifty scar, though.”

“You do good work. Thanks.”

With a nod, Tracy put away the scissors she’d used and tossed the soiled gauze, wrappings and bandanna into the trash. She lifted the hem of her blouse and inspected the damage there. “I’d better go clean up and change my clothes.”

Bull was flexing his fingers to ensure the wrapping wasn’t too tight, his focus thankfully shifted from the almost-kiss that would have played havoc with their best-bud status. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Take your time, I need to call Wyatt and let him know what’s happened.”

Tracy could hear Bull deep in a conversation with his brother in her living room when she peeked out of her bedroom and dashed across the hall to the bathroom to rinse out her blouse and wash the streaks of his blood from the right side of her rib cage before pulling on a clean T-shirt. With the door cracked open behind her, she could still hear his deep-pitched voice booming through her apartment. Tracy grinned. Subtlety would never be one of Bull McCabe’s finer traits. He was honest to a fault, dove into trouble with both feetfirst, apologized after the fact rather than ask for permission beforehand, and he guarded his heart as fiercely as he defended underdogs and baby sisters and a friend who thought she might actually be able to get answers from a pair of dangerous men.

Why would she ever think Bull might have been hiding tender feelings for the grown-up tomboy staring back at her from the mirror the way she’d been hiding feelings from him all these years?

Tracy picked up a brush and tried to tame her hair into a neat ponytail. But some things, no matter how badly she wanted them, just weren’t going to happen. They hadn’t happened ten years ago, and they weren’t going to happen now.

But they had shared a real kiss once.

Big, rough-and-tough Bull McCabe—most folks around Serpentine thought his only talents were taming rodeo bulls, winning fights and standing up to his hard-nosed father—had a secret gooey center that only a few lucky people ever got to see. She knew he was sensitive to the teasing he feared he’d get over his old-fashioned name. It had annoyed him that his classmates didn’t give him credit for being as smart as he was. He’d ached with the need to measure up to his father’s standards.

And when he’d shown up at her father’s barn one afternoon, with blood at the corner of his mouth and anger and hurt streaming out of every pore, she’d known Justice had lashed out at him again. Tracy had saddled up Lady and ridden down into the rocky valley near Homestead Creek with Bull that day. She’d listened for hours and wiped away the tears he’d shed, swearing that she’d never tell another living soul that Bull McCabe cried.

They were sitting on a flat rock, overlooking the trickle of the summer creek when he’d pulled her into his arms and hugged her tight. Much like he had a few minutes ago in her kitchen.

Only, at age seventeen, that thank-you, that shared closeness of bared souls, had turned into something more. With no kidnapped sister or seeping wound to distract him, with adolescent urges raging through their veins, Bull had kissed her. He’d pulled her onto his lap, knocked her hat off into the dust, tunneled his fingers into her hair and kissed her. And just as the shock wore off, just as she realized how much she liked his hand on her bottom and his tongue in her mouth—just as she decided she was in love with the boy next door—Bull had ended the kiss.

He had set her aside on the hard, sun-warmed rock. He’d raked his fingers through his hair and glanced at her with a red-faced grin.

“Was that weird?” he asked.

Before she could answer how special her first kiss had been, how unexpectedly perfect it had been to share that first kiss with Virgil McCabe, he was pushing to his feet, checking on his horse. “That was weird. I’m sorry, Trace. I just... I wasn’t thinking. We’re still cool, right? I mean, that won’t happen again. I promise.”

He seemed to be holding his breath, waiting for her answer as though he was afraid that kiss had somehow altered the friendship they’d always shared—that she’d be dumb enough to think he’d want something more from her. But she wasn’t dumb. “We’re cool.”

Swallowing the lump of hope and longing in her throat, Tracy picked up her hat and untethered Lady. If kissing her felt weird to Bull, then clearly, whatever feelings had suddenly sprung up inside her weren’t mutual. And wasting another moment lusting after her best bud wasn’t going to help either one of them. “The sun will be setting soon.” She offered the easiest reason to end the conversation and put some much-needed distance between them. “I’d better head back home.” She mounted up into the pinto’s saddle. “You coming?”

He shook his head. “I want to hang out here a little longer. The quiet is something I don’t get much of at home.”

“Are you gonna be okay?”

“Yeah. Thanks for listening.” He winked, resuming the familiar persona of the friends they were.

“See you at school tomorrow, Bull.”

“See ya, Trace.”

She nudged her heels into her horse’s sides and took off at a canter. Tracy made it all the way to the arroyo that split the McCabes’ land from her father’s before the embarrassment of forgetting she was just one of the guys, and the what-ifs of feelings that would never be, brimmed over into tears.

“Tracy?”

Her hairbrush clattered into the sink as the knock on the open bathroom door startled her back to the present.

Bull’s eyes narrowed as they caught her gaze in the mirror. “You okay?”

Oh, great. Her eyes felt gritty, as though she was going to give in to those adolescent tears again. Needing to hide those raw feelings now as she had back then, Tracy quickly turned on the faucet and splashed cool water on her face. “Yes. I’m fine.” She grabbed a towel to dry her skin and turned once she felt she could look him in the eye without giving anything away. But all those silly self-doubts vanished when she saw the tension lining his rugged face. Fear tightened her belly. “Is something wrong?”

He held up his phone. “There’s been another message from Calderón.”