Free OVER HER DEAD BODY: The Bliss Legacy - Book 2 by EC Sheedy Page A

money he spent, he’d found no trace of her.
    How the hell Hagan learned about his missing sister was anybody’s guess, but he’d put his money on Cassie. She’d probably been through his bank statements, picked up on the funds funneled to private investigators from a time he couldn’t risk returning to Seattle to look for April himself. No giant leap for Hagan to take it from there.
    Gus’s stomach clenched. If that son of a bitch was lying about what he knew, he was a bigger fool than Gus pegged him for—and he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.
    When Gus stopped being Dinah’s paid plaything a while back, and went into the personal security business, he’d made more money than he’d ever figured he would. It seemed the rich and paranoid were willing to pay plenty for a bodyguard who looked good in a tux and had the ability to take out a man’s eye with a knife from fifty feet.
    Yeah, he’d made more than enough for himself and Josh, and in the last couple of years, enough to hire the best of the best to look for April. All of which had netted him zero, leaving him coldly furious and dangerously frustrated. Feelings that had worsened since his return to Seattle. Being on the other side of the country made it easier to forget—at least intermittently. Here on the coast, the memories roared back.
    Pushing thoughts of his failure aside, he walked out of the bank into a cool misty day and headed up the street to where he’d parked his Jag.
    He wasn’t happy getting tangled up in Dinah’s life again, even if it was to save her sophisticated ass.
    But if she was in trouble …
    He cursed himself, pushed thoughts of Dinah aside.
    Damn it, this job wasn’t about her—or the crazy nun—it was about finding April. He unlocked his Jag, got in, and shoved the extra cash into the duffel bag in the back seat of the car.
    Fifteen minutes later he was heading southeast on the road to Erinville.
    Lightly scratching the scar on his jaw, Gus turned his mind to the problem at hand which was how to find out what was going on at Mayday House, while lying through his teeth to a woman who had a pair of lie detectors for eyes.
    Dinah was right about one thing: his male “attributes” weren’t going to help with Farrell. Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t give them a try.
    Even if he wouldn’t touch that nun with a barge pole.
     
    Dinah Marsden drank the last of her morning coffee, her thoughts divided between the unceasing ache left by Gus’s absence and the drone of Cassie’s voice telling her about her schedule.
    “… the opera tonight with the Smythes and the Uriens—”
    “Who in hell are the Uriens?” Dinah snapped, forcing herself to the matter at hand.
    Cassie, sitting across from her at the breakfast table, flipped through Dinah’s schedule. “Friends of the Smythes and the Connellys. You met them at the AIDS fund-raiser in March?” Cassie looked at her in that irritatingly quizzical way she used when she knew damn well Dinah had no idea what she was talking about—but should. It was an expression she used more and more of late.
    Dinah made an impatient hand-it-over gesture with her fingers, and Cassie shoved the schedule across the table.
    Dinah read, then shook her head. “I have no idea who these people are.” And it made her nervous. People made jokes about senior moments. Although what was funny about forgetting things, forgetting seriously important people, she’d never know. One thing was obvious; all the cosmetic surgery in the world didn’t stop brain seepage. She pushed the book back across the glass-topped table toward Cassie. “Check them out, will you?”
    When Cassie nodded, took a bite from her toast, and picked up the novel she’d set beside her plate, Dinah added, “Now, Cassie.”
    She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Of course,” she said and gave Dinah that increasingly common dead-fish look of hers that said nothing and everything. She started to get up.
    Dinah shot