Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

try to sell you something, maybe ask for a donation to a church or charity. Either way, he’d be used to people not wanting to talk to him, right? He wouldn’t take her rejection personally.

Would he?

An SUV drove past then, and late-afternoon sunlight flashed off its windshield, piercing her eyes like a pair of white-hot metal spikes. The pain in her head intensified, driving out all thoughts of the man who’d tried to ask her a question. Squinting to block out the light, she continued down the sidewalk toward the pharmacy and the relief that awaited her within.

Chapter One

Where the hell is the garlic powder?

It was a week after her terrible migraine. Lori stood in the baking aisle of FoodSaver, a plastic shopping basket gripped in her left hand, purse slung over her right shoulder. The basket contained ingredients for her dinner – wheat pasta, low-sodium marina sauce, grated parmesan cheese, vegetable-oil-based margarine, and a package of French bread she’d picked up in the store’s bakery section. She was going to make spaghetti tonight, and she planned to accompany it with what remained of the chardonnay she’d picked up earlier in the week. Larry wasn’t going to be home this evening. He actually had a gig, the first one in a couple weeks, and Justin had to work late tonight. She was on her own, and she intended to enjoy this rare night of solitude. She’d go home, make her food, pour the wine, and sit on the couch and eat while she watched the new season of her favorite comedy series that had dropped on Netflix today. There was a problem, though. She always made garlic bread to eat with spaghetti – she hated the premade frozen kind – but how was she supposed to make her own without any goddamn garlic powder?

She faced the shelves where containers of spices had been arranged in neat rows and organized alphabetically by the ingredients they held: allspice, anise, basil, bay leaves, black pepper…. Garlic powder should’ve been between fennel seed and ginger, but it wasn’t. Not only was it absent, there wasn’t an empty space where it should’ve been. She’d bought garlic powder here before. Did FoodSaver not carry it anymore? No, that was crazy. Garlic powder wasn’t some exotic spice with a hard-to-pronounce name that no one had heard of. It was a normal, everyday ingredient that people used all the time. It made no sense for it not to be here.

Maybe someone put it in the wrong place, she thought.

She started at the beginning – allspice – and slowly read the label of each container on the shelves. She knew she was being foolishly stubborn. She could have spaghetti without garlic bread, probably shouldn’t eat it in the first place. There were enough carbs in the pasta as it was. She didn’t need the extra in the bread. But once she’d fixed her mind on something – such as creating a perfect night for relaxing – she didn’t give up easily. Besides, she needed to relax. Melinda had busted her metaphorical balls at work today for going too hard on an elderly woman who’d recently undergone hip replacement surgery. This after chiding her for going too easy on Stevie last week. She wished the woman would make up her goddamn mind on how hard she wanted Lori to work her patients. She went through the spices all the way to the end – vanilla extract – without finding garlic powder. She knew it was going to be a wasted effort, but she decided to go through the spices a second time, in case she’d somehow missed the garlic powder. She’d barely started when she heard the sound of a shoe scuffing the tiled floor to her right.

She didn’t stop her second search to look at the person. She figured it was just another shopper, making his or her way down the aisle, searching for baking ingredients. Whoever it was, she hoped they had better luck locating items than she was having. The person came closer until only a foot separated them. She could see her – it was a woman – in her peripheral vision, and while she was annoyed by the woman’s physical proximity, she was determined to finish her second scan of the spices.

You’re a stubborn thing, her mother had once told her. Goddamn right, she thought and smiled.

“Confess.”

The woman spoke so softly that at first Lori wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. For that matter, she wasn’t certain that the woman had been talking to her at all, but she looked over at her just in case—

—and immediately wished she hadn’t.

The first thing Lori noticed about the woman was her eyes. They were too large for her face, and they were watery, so full of moisture that tears should’ve been running down her cheeks, but somehow it remained in her eyes, as if the woman held it there by some trick. But the worst part was the woman’s pupils. Instead of being round, they were black horizontal rectangles. Like goats’ eyes, she thought. There was something wrong with the skin around those eyes, too. It seemed soft, doughy, more like putty than flesh. She imagined she could reach out with an index finger and push those eyes back into the woman’s head without any resistance, and the putty-flesh would flow inward to cover up the spaces where the eyes had been.

Lori was by no means a physician, but as a healthcare professional, she’d had a certain amount of medical training, and she’d never seen or heard of any condition that could account for the woman’s bizarre eyes. The rest of her looked normal enough. She was of medium height – about the same size as Lori – and wore a pale-blue sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. Lori guessed she was in her early forties, although the weird skin around her eyes made her seem older. She wore no makeup, and her shoulder-length brown hair looked as if