Page 50 of Pay the Price

She didn’t know Gray was a predator, but I did, and if my encounter with him in the alley after the office hangout at the Mill hadn’t convinced me, I was convinced now.

Because in between attentive nods and smiles at Ruth, he was looking at me with an expression that made my blood run cold. One that said he knew exactly who Ruth was.

And exactly what he was doing.

Chapter 31

Daisy

Afew days later I stepped into the kitchen and found Jace standing at the open terrace door, speaking in low tones to someone on the other side.

I stopped mid-yawn and listened, trying to get a handle on who he was talking to, but I couldn’t make out any of the words and I finally walked farther into the kitchen and stopped a few steps behind him.

The Beasts had gotten better about telling me stuff, although we still tiptoed around the question of my dad and the missing girls, and no one — and I did mean no one — wanted to talk about Blake.

But this, this was weird.

It was early, morning sunlight streaming in through the wall of glass leading to the terrace, the house silent around us. Wolf and Otis weren’t even up yet, which was the weirdest thing of all. Wolf, sleep-tousled and sexy as all get out, was usually the first one in the kitchen in the morning, and I could usually count on at least a few torturous minutes of trying to picture him naked,his glorious inked chest against the crisp white sheets I used on all the beds.

I still hadn’t slept with any of the Beasts since I’d been home — not even Otis, because fucking Otis when Wolf and Jace were so close seemed like opening the lid on a Pandora’s box of sexual possibility — and it was getting harder and harder to deny the near-constant lust surging through my veins.

Jace said something else, his voice low and coaxing, and I edged closer to him.

“Who are you talking to?” I asked.

He spun around, his eyes wide. It was the closest I’d ever seen him to panic and it took me a few seconds to register the furry bundle in his arms.

A cat. And not just a cat, but a scraggly, mangy-looking cat missing patches of hair.

“No one,” he said, his gaze sliding nervously around the kitchen, like a thief who’d just gotten caught copping a candy bar.

He was wearing jeans and a faded black T-shirt. I tried not to stare at the slice of skin visible where the shirt didn’t quite cover his flat stomach and the glory trail that led under the waistband of his jeans, tried not to remember the way his pierced dick had felt in my hand.

“Okayyyyy,” I said. “Then what are you doing?”

He was holding the cat easily. It definitely wasn’t his first time. “Just leaving some food out for Cat.”

I crossed the room and looked through the open door to the terrace, then spotted a dish of wet cat food on the porch. “You bought cat food?”

This was starting to seem less like a one-time thing and more like Jace had a secret pet.

“He was hungry.” A note of defensiveness had crept into his voice. “I think he’s a stray.”

I turned around to look at him, the sun warm on my back through the open door and the birds chirping their early morning song.

Jace looked almost human holding the cat, if you took away the fact that he was a giant with biceps the size of tree trunks.

He started petting the cat’s nearly hairless neck and I narrowed my eyes before walking to the cupboards.

“What are you doing?” He almost sounded scared.

I opened a few cupboards before finally finding what I was looking for under the microwave: stacks of wet cat food in a variety of flavors. I had a sudden image of Jace at the grocery store, standing in the pet food aisle and carefully choosing cans of food for the cat still in his arms.

I turned to face him. “You’ve been taking care of this cat!”

I couldn’t keep the triumph out of my voice because Jace taking care of anything felt like finding a piece of gold in the shimmering rocks at the bottom of the river.

“So?” He held the cat tighter. “He doesn’t have a home. And he was hungry.”

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