The Company You Keep Read Free Page A

unhooked her bra and let it slide to the water below. The jets from the fountain hit the undersides of her small breasts. The chilly water made her nipples pucker tightly. She slipped one thumb in the side of her underpants. “You think I won’t do it?”
“No, that’s the problem. I think you just might.”
“So you’re attuned to me after all.” This time Mimi threw back her head and laughed. Then she looked him straight in the eye, put her other thumb in the other side of her panties and did a little wiggle. “So what do you intend to do about it, Mr. Look-But-Don’t-Leap?”
She wiggled some more as she worked the elastic waistband down her thighs.
“Well, I’m certainly done looking.” He came in after her.
“My, my, you didn’t even take off your shoes. Now that’s impulsive.” She held open her arms.
He slogged through the water to reach her.
And that’s when the police sirens came wailing down the street.

CHAPTER ONE
     
A LOUD WAIL INTERRUPTED Mimi’s whimpering. The mechanical, incessant noise went on…and on. Mimi pressed her forehead down. She wanted to cover her ears, and even though logically she knew that movement was impossible, she reflexively went to raise her arms.
She expected to feel the binding restraints and the shooting pain. Miraculously, there was none. Just the incessant ringing and ringing…
Then the noise stopped.
Mimi rolled over and opened her eyes. And realized she was lying on her own queen-size bed in her own apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and not…not captive in that hellhole in Chechnya—blindfolded, beaten, alternating between bouts of despondency and glimmers of hope.
She turned her head on the downy pillow and gazed out the window toward the light—something she’d been deprived of for months, something that was now so precious. It didn’t disappoint.
It was one of those rare winter mornings in Manhattan when the gray clouds of January had decided to take a holiday. The sun streamed in through the glass like some visionary painting.
It should have warmed her. It didn’t.
Mimi still hadn’t gained any weight back after she’d been kidnapped while on assignment in Chechnya, a forced confinement that had lasted almost six months. Two months had passed since her television news network had secured her release, but she still suffered an almost bone-numbing coldness.
She wriggled deeper under the white duvet cover. The feel of the expensive Egyptian cotton material reassured her without fully erasing the nightmare.
Mimi had never been introspective for a variety of reasons. She freely admitted the obvious one that she simply never had the luxury of time to stop and think. The other reasons she kept private, even from her best friend from college, Lilah Evans. But since…since the kidnapping—there, she’d said it—she was beginning to appreciate just how bizarre time and memory were.
For instance, off the top of her head, she had virtually no idea what she’d done all day yesterday. Yet the exact events of the day she was abducted remained crystalline clear. Not surprising, really, since every night when she sought comfort in sleep, she instead kept reliving that day over and over, each detail more vivid, each smell more penetrating, each sound more ominous, the pain…
She forced herself to focus on the cream-colored walls of her room. They were bare except for a few framed photos of colleagues and friends. Several showed her family: her mother blowing out candles on a birthday cake; her half-brother, Press, who’d graduated from Grantham University last year and was now in Australia; and her little half-sister, Brigid, a bundle of energy who was eight going on sixteen. There were none of her father. The photos showed people laughing, happy. She was in a few, too—laughing, happy. She sniffed, trying to recall the feeling. She couldn’t. That was the thing about memory. It was selective, even when you didn’t want it to be.
Mimi shifted back