Limit future posts by number or date in custom query

hello folks,

The story is that I have a dedicated category for Events with many scheduled posts in it as Upcoming events.

Now, in the home page I need to show both scheduled (upcoming events) posts and published ones (from every other category).

so I tried modifing the query this way:

query_posts('post_status=future,publish');

But the problem is that there are a lot of scheduled posts (15+) and the obvious result is a page with only scheduled posts (I’m showing 6 posts per page).

So my goal is to set the query to limit only scheduled posts to, let’s say, 3 or show the scheduled posts within 15 days from today.

I wonder if is that possible…