Three Cowboys

Chapter Five

Tracy’s eyes drifted open to the first glimmer of sunrise peeking over the lip of the rocky bank on the far side of the creek. She should be cold and achy from a night on the hard ground with nothing but a saddle blanket to sleep on, and one to curl up under.

Instead, she was deliciously warm. The backside of her was, anyway, as were her legs and stomach. She tugged the blanket more snugly around the front of her body, nestled her head against its hard pillow, and let her eyes blink shut again.

There hadn’t been enough usable wood to build a fire last night, so they’d dined on energy bars, dried fruit and water, taken care of the horses and let exhaustion carry them off to sleep. Well, Julio’s eyes had closed as soon as he’d wrapped up in his blanket. And though she’d valiantly attempted to wait up until Bull had finished circling the camp, checking the horses, checking the weather, checking for any signs of unwanted company, sleep had claimed her before she could convince Bull that he needed to be rested and alert even more than she did.

Had Bull slept at all? Had he taken her up on her offer to share the second blanket? Tracy stretched her legs, frowning as conscious thought pushed aside memories from the night before. Had he done something dumb and selfish and heroic and wonderful like stay up all night keeping watch over them?

“Shh, blue eyes.” The blanket around her waist tightened as Bull’s deep, drowsy voice whispered against her ear. “I need five more minutes of quiet before I’m ready to do this today.”

Tracy’s eyes popped wide open. With every suddenly rapid heartbeat, a new level of awareness assailed her. The delicious warmth was Bull spooning against her back. The blanket at her waist was his arm cinched around her, her pillow was his strong biceps. Their legs were tangled where they lay on Jericho’s blanket, facing the sunrise. The cover she’d tugged up higher was Bull’s hand, splayed possessively across her torso, his thumb and fingers nestled beneath the weight of her breasts. His lips, when he spoke, danced against the tender skin of her neck while his warm breath teased the shell of her ear.

He lay behind her, encircling her with his strength and heat. His breathing moved in sync with hers. And his lips weren’t just moving against her skin—they were kissing her, seducing her. “I could wake up like this every morning. Quiet breeze. Fresh air. You.”

“Bull.” She didn’t know whether to protest or make a joke or let the melody singing in her heart drive away the cautionary logic of that seventeen-year-old girl who still lingered inside her. “I see you took me up on my offer to share the blanket.”

“Funny.” His teeth excited a sensitive bundle of nerves beneath the neckline of her shirt and she didn’t feel like laughing at all. He shifted behind her, perhaps easing some space between them, perhaps simply giving his hand easier access to the snap of her jeans. “Do you know you have the prettiest, most perfectly shaped bottom I’ve ever seen fill a pair of jeans?”

Bull splayed his hand over her abdomen and pulled her back, snug against the cup of his pelvis. Tracy gasped at the evidence of what he was feeling pressed against that perfectly shaped bottom. Tracy felt her face heating at the compliment. Other things were warming up, too, and she didn’t seem to be making any effort to stop what was happening to her. “Is this what you meant when you said you needed five more minutes of quiet?”

“Don’t argue semantics with me, Miss Cobb,” he teased. “I’m just going where the morning takes me. Unless you want me to stop?”

Shaking her head, Tracy lay her hand over his and guided it back down her belly.

Without another word, he rolled her over and moved partially on top of her, his heavier weight sinking down around her yielding body, reminding her that he was every inch a rugged, powerful man. And yet he was being so careful with her, careful not to crush the breath out of her, careful not to let the calloused hand that slid beneath her blouse be too rough against her skin or too needy when he squeezed her breast in his palm and rolled the hard, achy tip between his fingers.

Despite the moan of secret pleasure she trapped in her throat, Tracy locked her eyes onto the beautiful gray eyes above her and whispered, “Did you know you were my first kiss back in high school?”

“Hadn’t thought about it. But I’m glad. I like the practice we’ve been getting lately, too.”

Tracy gasped at the shards of pleasure tingling in her and shooting down through her womb, making her feel heavy and tight. Taking his own sweet time, Bull slid his hand down inside her jeans, and she squeezed her thighs around him, eager to relieve the pressure building there. “Easy.” But his chest was expanding and pushing against hers with the same excited rhythm consuming her. “Five minutes of quiet, remember?”

He slipped a finger inside her, pushing against that most sensitive nub. “Not fair,” she gasped, urging the buttons of his shirt open, eager to take some of the same liberties he was.

“Shh. Just let me.” It was getting harder to keep her eyes open, harder to remember that they weren’t alone, hard to remember those five minutes of quiet he wanted when he was priming her to cry out his name.

“And did you know...” She didn’t think she could take much more of the slow, wicked massage of his fingers. She wanted...she needed... “I’ve never been...” The pent-up release of her body spasming against his hand came out in a long, voiceless gasp from her throat. “...with anyone else.”

“What?” Bull was breathing just as hard as she was. But the handsome grin faded before her eyes. “You saved yourself for me?”

Aftershocks still made her body weak when he pulled his hand from her jeans and looked down into her eyes. Propping himself up on an elbow, he shifted his weight off her. He glanced over to ensure Julio was still snoring away. But suddenly Tracy felt as though a clock had started ticking down some sort of countdown again. “Well, technically, we still haven’t done it.”

“Tracy...” Bull opened his mouth to speak, then dropped his head to brand her lips with his. It was a quick, hard kiss, hinting at something more before he pulled away. “You should have told me.”

She reached up to stroke the worry lines from beside his eyes. “Like we ever had a conversation where the topic came up? In fact, I thought with what was happening, it was exactly the right time to mention it.”

He shook his head. Glanced over at Julio’s sleeping form. Shook his head again. “I don’t have time to do this right this morning. And it needs to be right. But I want to do it. I want to be with you.”

“Bull, I—”

“Uh-uh.” He swept aside the hair that had fallen across her face. “When we’re this close and you’re looking at me like that—a conversation like this?—you call me Virgil.”

“Virgil.” It felt like saying yes to him. Using his given name felt like she was special to him. She wanted to be special to Virgil McCabe. “Please don’t tell me you think this is weird. I can’t tell you how much I hate when you use that word. I’ve waited a long time for you to want me the way I want you.”

“I can’t tell you how much I do.” He wound his finger into that stubborn tendril of hair that refused to be contained. He pulled it to his lips and kissed it before tucking it gently, albeit futilely, behind her ear. “I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that Tomboy Tracy and you are the same woman. The only thing weird is how thickheaded I’ve been about us. I never even considered staying in Texas. I just knew I had to get away. Now I’ve been gone so long. And my timing is as bad as ever. I still don’t know if I can stay with Justice around. And you deserve someone who’ll stay. Plus, there’s my job in Chicago. And Brittany. If I’d had a lick of sense any sooner... And now the clock’s ticking—”

She pressed her finger against his mouth, silencing his apology. “Our time will come. If it’s meant to be, and you’re willing to give us a chance to be more than friends, it’ll happen. I’ll wait for you to come home for however long it takes you to be ready, Virgil. Trust me, I’m a patient woman.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“I know. But I love you, anyway.”

They both smiled. He kissed her one more time, giving her comfort, giving her hope. Then he rolled off her and stood, grabbing Tracy’s hand and pulling her to her feet in front of him. “Then let’s go get my sister. We’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

* * *

“THERE’S NOBODY HERE.” Bull paced off the dusty length of the short adobe wall that surrounded the hacienda’s front yard. The cell reception was better out here than it had been inside the house. Squinting, he tipped his face up toward the sun burning high in the sky. Judging by the food still sitting on the plates inside on the long kitchen table, and the multiple tire tracks that hadn’t yet blown off the dusty gravel road, the people who’d been at Calderón’s hacienda had left fast, and not all that long ago.

“How hard is it to find?” Wyatt asked.

“It’s in the middle of nowhere,” Bull answered. “There are no alpacas grazing, and no coca plants that I can see. It’s like a weigh station. Julio Rivas said Calderón has a bunch of these hidey-holes around the area. It’s situated on high ground. Everything’s beige and dusty. But he must have an underground sprinkler system here. If you’re in the air, there’s no way you’d miss the green grass.” With a nod to Julio, who was watering the horses at a shade-covered trough just outside the fence, Bull turned and strode back toward the house. “Use GPS to mark this spot. It may be a wild goose chase to misdirect us, but if you can get the authorities to cooperate, there’s got to be some evidence you can process here.”

“Bull?” Tracy called to him from the front door and waved him inside. “She was here.”

“Hold on, Wyatt. I think Tracy found something.” The temperature dropped a good twenty degrees as he hopped onto the porch and stepped inside the hacienda’s thick clay walls. His eyes immediately went to the lime-green-flowered backpack Tracy was sorting through.

“I found this in that little building out back—probably the old summer kitchen from when this place was first built.” She pulled out a crumpled spiral notebook with green and purple ink doodles all over the cover. “This is her class journal. She always has it with her.”

“Show me.” Bull followed her through the house and out the back door to the crumbling summer kitchen. Inside, he found an empty roll of duct tape and the stinky odor of dried vomit. Glancing at the rope bed with its straw mattress and evidence of it being used, Bull muttered a curse and turned his attention back to his brother. “She was definitely being held here. I’m not sure for how long.” He touched the sticky, splintered spot on one of the bedposts where some of that duct tape had anchored something, or someone. “But they’ve moved her.”

“Got any idea where they went?”

“I’ll look around. But the horses—and Julio, too—are going to need to get back and get some rest.”

Off in the distance, Bull heard the horses whinnying and shuffling about. Something had Jericho and Lila agitated. Julio shouted something in Spanish.

Bull pulled the phone from his ear. “What did he say?”

Tracy handed him the notebook and backed out the door. “I couldn’t make it out, either. Finish your conversation. I want help here as soon as we can get it. I’ll check it out.” She spun around and broke into a jog. “I have no idea how experienced he is with horses.”

Wyatt was still talking when Bull put the phone back to his ear and followed. “...worry about preserving any of the evidence. I’ll see about getting a task force helicopter there ASAP. Can you make it back to J-Bar-J land all right?”

“Yup. I’ll get everybody home.”

He heard a gunshot and a scream and a galloping horse. Bull’s heart sank and his entire body tensed. Tracy. “Get your backup here now! I’ve got company.”

He snapped the phone shut, exchanging it for his Smith & Wesson as he approached the front door. Pressing his back against the wall, he angled his head to get a visual on whatever was happening out front. A plume of dust masked most of what he needed to see, but he could make out Jericho, ears pricked and tail nervously erect, trotting down the road after the bolting mare.

“Señor McCabe!” Bull’s blood turned to ice in his veins at the familiar thick Latin accent. “You come out, detective. I have your woman and the boy.”

“Bull?” Tracy called out. “They shot Julio.”

“Silencio!”

“Tracy!” That bastard had hit her again. But she was alive. He could work with that. Bull put his hands in the air and moved to the open doorway. “I’m coming out.”

Cautiously, he stepped onto the porch, making a big, bad target of himself and hopefully taking Sol Garcia’s focus off Tracy. But his patience stuck in his throat when he saw Garcia standing in the middle of the gravel road beyond the adobe fence. Tracy knelt beside Julio, who lay in the dust. Garcia had a handful of Tracy’s hair clenched in his fist, pulling her head back so he could press his Glock 9 mil into her temple.

“Out here,” Garcia ordered. “Put down your weapon.”

Holding his hands high in the air, Bull stepped down to the grass. His gaze darted from Tracy to Garcia and back again—reassuring, condemning, reassuring again. Tracy was breathing hard, her eyes were afraid, but she wasn’t hurt. Julio, on the other hand was bleeding between the fingers he clutched over his upper arm. And the horses had charged off to who knew where?

Everything inside Bull twisted up with the need to go to Tracy. But she needed him to harness his impulsiveness and be patient. For her. “You hurt her, you son of a bitch, and I will kill you.”

“My employer, Señor Calderón, said to kill the boy before he talks. But I see he has nine lives, and that he already has told the authorities about the girl. Calderón is tired of your interference. And so am I.”

“Where’s Brittany?” Bull demanded. “Where’s my sister?”

“Your sister? Ah, no wonder you are so relentless in pursuing us.” Garcia’s teeth shone white against his tanned skin as he laughed. “She is someplace safe with Calderón himself. He will convince your father to grant him the land he needs. You cannot stop him.” The sick white smile vanished. “You should be worried about the problem here, señor. Now put down your gun, before I shoot your woman.”

His woman. Damn straight, Tracy Cobb was his. Always had been but he’d been too caught up in the idea that nothing ever changed with Justice, the J-Bar-J or Serpentine. But he’d changed. Tracy had changed. Their relationship had changed. And no smiling son of a bitch with a gun and a knife was going to take Tracy from him before he could tell her just how much being with her these past couple of days had changed him—and how he was willing to put up with Justice and wrestle with the demons from his past if she’d give them the chance to be together.

He flashed his gaze over Tracy, hoping they were still in tune enough for her to read how much he loved her.

Then he set down his gun in the grass, never taking his eyes off Garcia’s. This standoff was a little unbalanced. Bull against one man? Even if he was unarmed, men like Sol Garcia liked to have a little insurance. “Where’s the big guy?”

Tracy’s blue eyes darted to his right. At her warning glance, Bull turned to see Manuel Ortiz charging from the corner of the house. Why the big man didn’t use the gun in his hand to shoot him instead, Bull would never know. When the gun came swinging at his head, Bull ducked and rammed his shoulder into Ortiz’s gut. They hit the ground hard and rolled. The gun got kicked underneath the porch as the two men traded blows.

Bull took a punch to the gut and a crueler blow to his injured forearm. But his attacker lacked Bull’s motivation to end the fight sooner rather than later. Howling with pain and the adrenaline pouring through his system, Bull planted his fist in the middle of Ortiz’s broken face, knocking the man out cold. Then, breathing hard, not wanting to risk any more surprise attacks, Bull pulled his handcuffs off his belt and slapped them around Ortiz’s wrists. “You’re next, Garcia.”

“Enough, detective!” Bull pushed himself up onto his knees and froze. He’d forgotten about patience. “Calderón said someone would be coming. That we should stop them and send a message back to Justice McCabe.” Garcia had tucked the gun into his belt, yanked Tracy to her feet and now held that damned stiletto to her throat. A tiny drip of blood trickled down Tracy’s smooth throat from where the blade pricked her skin. “I know how to get your attention, don’t I, detective?”

“Virgil?” She clawed at Garcia’s wrist.

“Here’s your message.”

The seconds ticked off like eons frozen in time. Bull dove for his gun. He came up with the weapon in his hands. The knife moved. He planted his knee. Aimed.

Bang.

Garcia’s head jerked back. Forget negotiating with the bastard. Garcia crumpled to the ground, taking Tracy with him.

“Tracy!” Bull ran to pry her from the dead man’s grasp. “Are you hurt? How bad is it?”

She scrambled to her knees and flung her arms around his neck, clinging to him like a life preserver. Bull lifted her with one arm behind her back, turning her face away from the blood pooling beneath Garcia’s head. He kicked away the knife and stepped over the body to check on Julio. “You okay, kid?”

The boy still clutched his arm, but nodded. “Miss Cobb?”

Bull set her feet on the ground, okayed the color in her cheeks and the beautiful clarity of her eyes before planting a kiss on her mouth. “She’ll be okay.”

Tracy’s hands were moving over him, touching the abrasion on his chin, muttering a sweet little curse as she pulled his arms between them. “You’re bleeding again.”

“I’ll live.”

She wrapped her hand around his neck and stretched up on tiptoe to return the same quick, needy kiss he’d given her. “You’d better.”

And then she was on the ground, rolling Julio onto his back and checking the bullet graze on his arm. “I came out and saw Sol Garcia had dragged him into the road. I spooked the horses. They knocked Garcia out of the way so I could get to him.”

Bull holstered his gun and knelt down to give Julio’s good arm a reassuring squeeze. Thank God the kid was still breathing. There was something tough and tenacious about this young man that Bull was learning to admire.

“Garcia shot him. I never saw Ortiz. They must have parked away from here and walked up.”

“The shot just winged him. He’ll be fine.”

“But he’s been through so much. Too much. He’s just a boy.”

Bull reached over and brushed that sexy little twist of hair off her forehead, calming her the way she always did him. “He’s gonna be okay. Get some water from the house and anything you can tear up to use as a bandage.”

“I’ll find one for your arm, too.”

Stubborn woman. He allowed himself a brief moment of indulgence to watch her run back into the house before pulling out his phone and punching in Wyatt’s number. “Put a paramedic on that chopper,” he advised his brother after giving a concise report on the two Los Jaguares he’d put out of commission. “Better send a horse trailer, too.”

Bull spotted Jericho, grazing off some of that pristine grass Calderón had planted. The big horse let Bull tether him up. Hopefully, Tracy’s mount would calm down and rejoin them, too, before she ran herself all the way home.

“Señor McCabe...” Julio had managed to get himself up to a sitting position, and was leaning back against the low adobe wall by the time Bull came back. “Are they dead?”

“Garcia is. Neither one is coming after you again.”

“But others will?”

“I think so. As long as Calderón thinks you can tell the authorities about his organization, you’re a threat to him.”

“If I tell the authorities what I know, will they still arrest me?”

Bull knelt down to the teenager’s level. “I can’t say for sure. But I do know that telling us everything you know will help us learn more about Calderón and his operation. And that kind of knowledge may be what helps us bring Brittany home before Christmas.”

The boy nodded resolutely, despite a grimace of pain. “Then I will tell all I know. For Brittany.”

“I think you’d better start calling me Bull. I have a feeling you and I are going to be spending a lot of time together.”

“What about Miss Cobb?”

“Oh, I intend to spend a lot of time with her, too.”