Fiona Brand - Blind Instinct

Bayard draped the leather jacket over her shoulders. “You need it more than I do.”

The fleeting pressure of his touch, his clean masculine scent enfolding her, was a reminder of what they had been doing just minutes ago, and how close she had come to more. A part of her still craved him, which was doubly crazy. She stepped away, pointedly avoiding any further contact.

His gaze was remote. “It’s all right, I won’t touch you.”

That’s right, don’t touch me. Don’t come within a mile of me .

It had taken her years to recover from the dreams, the horror that had pushed through into her life. She still had trouble with the night, and sleeping.

She wanted Bayard, but she couldn’t allow him near her again. She couldn’t afford him.

The trip home was awkward. The evening was mild, but she couldn’t get warm despite the jacket and the heater switched on. Half an hour later, Bayard dropped her back at her house. He waited until she made it to the porch and stepped inside the front hall before reversing and heading down the drive.

Cavanaugh .

The stark moment of recognition shivered through her again.

She had remembered Bayard. That fact alone was stunning. If someone from that previous life was going to be in her life now, why wasn’t it someone like her parents or Steve?

She watched until the sweep of Bayard’s headlights disappeared. She didn’t know anyone by the name of Cavanaugh, although she was sure that if she checked the phone book, she would find a long list. Not that she was going to do that. As far as she was concerned the past was the past and it could stay there; she didn’t want it in either her present or her future.

She was Sara Fischer in this life, but in the Second World War she knew with flat certainty that she had been someone else—an English spy called Sara Weiss. Beyond that basic recall, and the blurred memories of dreams, she didn’t have many concrete details. By the age of eight, annoyed by the disruptive effect of Dr. Dolinsky’s tactics, her father had taught her what he had termed “applied amnesia.” In effect, how to dismiss and forget the dreams. For several weeks every time she woke from a dream, her father had instantly distracted her by reading her chapters of a novel until she fell asleep. By the time they had worked their way through the full set of a popular series of children’s mysteries, she had learned the knack of not thinking about the dreams. Without the strong link created by repeatedly recalling the dreams, or talking about them, they had literally dissolved so that, if she thought of them at all, all she remembered was that she had dreamed, not the content.

Her father didn’t know it, and he wouldn’t be happy if she told him, but she had made some enquiries about Sara Weiss, and found that she had existed, the daughter of a German businessman and a Frenchwoman, who had been resident in England. She had died in 1943, although she hadn’t ever been able to find any details about her death.

Finding out that Sara Weiss had existed had been a jolt. Up until that point, the idea that she was remembering actual events had been a purely cerebral reality, with no grounding in fact.

She had conducted a search on the Internet. Seeing the name listed in black and white, the details of a life that uncannily mirrored her own in terms of interests and education, then discovering that Sara Weiss had died while in her early thirties, had shaken her.

Somewhere there would be a grave. Proof of a life lived and lost. A life that still lingered on in her mind.

Accepting that reality was difficult enough. Being confronted with a physical link to that past in the form of Bayard was a complication she didn’t need.

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