Three Cowboys - By Julie Miller Page 0,1

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