Diana Palmer - Untameable

He licked it and laughed up at her with sparkling eyes. He was going to be handsome when he was older, she thought. She thanked God every day that he looked more like her than his father.

When they got home, just after dark, the front door was standing open.

“Stay here,” Joceline told Markie firmly.

“What is it, Mommy?”

She didn’t answer. She went to a point where she could see the front door. Nothing was visible inside it. She knew better than to walk into the apartment. Someone had broken in. Someone who might still be in there, might be armed, might want to kill Joceline and Markie just for their closeness to Jon Blackhawk …!

“Well!” came a deeply accented voice from inside the apartment. “It’s a good thing you didn’t come home sooner.”

And Rourke appeared in the doorway, big and handsome and smiling.

“ROURKE!” JOCELINE EXCLAIMED. “You idiot! You scared me to death!”

He strode down the steps, his hands in his pockets, whistling. He was tall and lean and muscular, with long blond hair in a ponytail down his back. He had one light brown eye. The other was hidden under a rakish black eye patch. “Now, darlin’, if I hadn’t come along when I did, you’d have had a very bad shock when you opened that front door. Hi, little feller. How are you?” he asked the small boy in the backseat in a very pronounced South African accent.

“I’m good,” Markie said. “Who are you?”

“Rourke,” was the amused reply.

“You only got one eye.”

“I noticed,” Rourke told him, not taking offense.

“I’m sorry.”

The man looked at the boy with a visible softening. “Nice of you to say that.”

“Did some mean man hurt you?”

“You might say that,” Rourke replied.

“I like your eye patch. You could be a pirate on Halloween.”

Rourke burst out laughing. “You know, I’ve been called a pirate a time or two.” He looked pointedly at Joceline.

“Why are you here, and what’s wrong with the apartment?” she asked worriedly.

“Nothing major. Step over here a bit.” He smiled reassuringly at Markie. But when he turned back to Joceline, his hard face was solemn. “Someone had a go at your desk. At a guess, they were looking for something. Any idea what?”

Her heart stopped. She had no important papers, nothing that would interest an outsider. There was only the usual things, bank deposit records, tax information, Markie’s birth certificate and her own, nothing … nothing … There was her diary!

She brushed past Rourke and ran into the apartment in a panic. She kept the diary in her bedside table, but it was under a mass of other objects, like paperbacks and a pad and pen, over-the-counter analgesics, booklets and instructions for electronic things like her clock. She fumbled in the drawer, horrified at some of the things she’d written down. It had never occurred to her than anyone would rob her!

She pulled out books, scattering them, scared to death. But then, there it was, at the bottom of the drawer, its small lock intact. It hadn’t been opened. She clutched it to her breast and shivered with reaction.

“Something damaging in there, I presume?” Rourke asked gently.

She looked at him with sick fear. “People write things that they never should.”

He nodded solemnly. “Yes.”

She drew in a harsh breath. “I’d better burn it, I think.”

“Put it in the bank, in a safe-deposit box,” he suggested.

She stared at him. “Along with my diamond collection and my gold bars.”

He laughed.

“Listen, I can barely pay the rent. There’s no money for extras. It’s better to destroy it. No good could come of keeping it, anyway.”

“Keeping what, Mommy?” Markie asked as he joined them. Rourke had brought him inside the minute Joceline vanished into the apartment.

She grimaced at her lack of instinct, leaving Markie alone in the car.

“It’s all right, I’ve got your back,” Rourke assured her with a smile.

“It’s just a diary, Markie,” Joceline told him. “I wanted to make sure I knew where it was, that’s all.”

“Can I read it?”

She swallowed. “When you’re older.” “Okay.”

Rourke was watching her through a narrowed pale brown eye. Something in that diary was enough to make her panic. He wondered what it was.

THE REST of the apartment was seemingly untouched, at first glance. Joceline was nervous. Someone had touched her things, invaded her privacy. She felt violated. Now she wondered if she needed new locks.

“Yes, you do,” Rourke said when she mentioned it. “I’ll install dead bolts tomorrow. Do you need permission from the landlord?”

She shook her head. “I asked once before and the manager approved it, in writing. I just didn’t get around to it.”

Rourke nodded.

Her expression was briefly unguarded as she looked up at him. “I wasn’t scared before,” she said unsteadily.

His one eye narrowed, and his lean face hardened. “Any normal human being would be afraid for a child,” he said quietly, so that Markie didn’t hear.

She turned on the small television. “Time for someone’s favorite show, I believe?” she teased, putting Markie in his little beanbag chair in front of the TV.

He giggled. “I love this one,” he told her, and immediately became entranced by the cartoon characters on the screen.

“He can already pick out certain characters in Japanese just by watching that cartoon,” Joceline told Rourke. “I think he may have a flair for languages.”

“Do you speak any?” he asked without appearing to care.

She laughed. “I can barely speak my own language.”

“Then he must get it from his father or someone else in his family,” he said easily.

Joceline went pale. “You think so? I’d better check and make sure nothing was taken.” Which brought back the enormity of having her apartment ransacked. She was terrified and trying not to show it, because she didn’t want to upset Markie

She went quickly from room to room and found that though she’d thought nothing else had been touched, she was wrong. There were papers scattered, drawers askew, even chair cushions upended.

“What in the world could they have been looking for?” she wondered uneasily.

“What sort of important papers do you keep here, besides that diary?” Rourke asked, nodding toward the diary that she was holding so tightly in one hand.

She pushed back her hair and looked around worriedly. “Nothing much. The usual bills and important papers. Birth certificates.”

“Are they all here?”

She went to the folder where she kept her personal documents, in a cheap cardboard filing cabinet, and pulled out the file folder. There was nothing that would prove anything. She’d been very careful about that.

She opened the folder and looked inside, and sighed with helpless relief. “Everything’s right here,” she said, and laughed unsteadily.

Rourke’s eyes were narrow and thoughtful. He wasn’t going to tell her that there were ways to collect documents without physically removing them. Any good agent carried a tiny camera, often disguised as a cigarette lighter or pen. A lock on a diary was so simple to open that a beginner could do it with ease, and without leaving any telltale mark of tampering. She was unusually worried about that diary and some of her important papers. Why?

She saw his mind working and her face tautened. “Don’t pry.”

“Was I prying?” he exclaimed, and grinned.

“You were thinking about it,” she accused.

“Pretty and smart and reads minds, too,” he teased.

She flushed. “Let’s leave it at ‘smart.’”