Limit number of posts when only showing one category

I'm using some code in my central column which checks to make sure that a post is in a particular category ("Top Story") before actually showing it on the home page.

What I want to do is to only display, say, 3 of the top stories and no more.

The trouble is, if I limit the number of visible posts using the standard Wordpress Reading settings to 3, then it only actually shows me 1 post - because the posts that are in that category are something like the 1st, 5th and 9th post in the list of posts.

So is there a way I can somehow set the posts limit to "quite high" and then tell the central column code in Atahualpa to only show the top story posts until its shown 3 of them?

What do you think?