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

the fucking things, but she’d had no success locating them. When she’d been younger, she thought that old people who wore their reading glasses tethered to a loop of string around their necks were pathetic. Obviously, they were so damned senile they’d lose their things if they didn’t keep them on their person at all times. Now she was one of those old people – although she no longer considered being in her fifties as old – and she misplaced her reading glasses often.

She wasn’t certain that she’d had them with her when she’d arrived for her physical therapy appointment with Lori, but she’d decided to retrace her steps and see if she’d accidentally left them somewhere. She was going in reverse, so she’d start at Get Moving! and if she didn’t find her glasses here, she’d return to the diner where she’d eaten breakfast this morning and see if she’d left them on the table when she’d departed. She knew she could simply buy a new pair. Non-prescription ones didn’t cost much, and you could find them at any grocery or pharmacy. But it was the principle of the goddamned thing. They were her glasses and she was determined to find them, even if she had to spend the rest of her day driving all over the fucking town.

Lori had once commented on her stubbornness, saying that if she directed it toward her physical therapy, kept up with her exercises at home, she’d be sure to see results. Debra knew the woman had only been doing her job, but she’d almost told her to go fuck herself just the same.

She turned off the car, and when she moved to open the driver’s-side door a bolt of white-hot pain lanced through her left shoulder. She’d been taking over-the-counter painkillers and anti-inflammatories like they were candy for the last several weeks, but they only did so much to blunt the pain. She drew in a hissing breath, muttered, “Fuck,” and pushed the door open. She got out of the car slowly, hoping to avoid setting off any more pain, and then gently closed the door behind her. Even though she used her right hand to do this, her shoulder gave a twinge, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as before, and she counted this as a minor victory.

She knew her injury was her goddamned fault. She’d kept horses ever since she’d been a little girl, and she’d been cleaning stalls all this time. The sawdust you put down in a horse’s stall absorbed their urine when they pissed, and when they pissed, they pissed a flood. They were big animals, after all. The sawdust grew sodden and heavy, and when you shoveled it into a bucket to remove it, you had to be careful not to put in too much at a time, or else the bucket would be too heavy to carry. Last month, there’d been a stretch of several days when it had rained like a sonofabitch – strong winds, lightning, thunder, the whole fucking deal – and she’d kept the horses, a quarter horse named Lucky and a Friesian named Gustav, in the barn until the storms finally blew over. When she let them out into the field, she had days’ worth of manure and urine-soaked sawdust to clean up. She’d been impatient, and instead of filling buckets up halfway, dumping them outside, and returning for more, she filled them up full to overflowing and struggled to lift and carry them out of the barn. She knew better, that was the hell of it, but she’d done it anyway, and in the process fucked up her shoulder big time.

She lived alone – sharing living space with another person would irritate the hell out of her, and she knew she’d be no picnic to cohabitate with either – so she had no one to help her with the chores around the farm. Thanks to her goddamned shoulder, everything took twice as long for her to do now. She was convinced her shoulder would eventually heal on its own, but in the meantime, she needed better meds to help her function. Her fucking doctor insisted she try physical therapy for a month before the bastard would prescribe heavy-duty painkillers and muscle relaxers for her, and while she resented the hell out of him for it, she was determined to get through the stupid therapy and get her drugs. The staff at Get Moving! were nice enough, if a little too fanatical in their devotion to the great god of Physical Rehabilitation, but she still hated going there, and she resented the fact that she had to return. One visit a day was way more than enough for her.

But she needed her fucking glasses, couldn’t read a goddamned thing without them.

When she walked into Get Moving!, the first thing she noticed was an odd smell. She’d lived in the country all her life, and she knew the smell of meat starting to rot, knew the smell of spilled blood. The mingled odors triggered an alarm in her subconscious, but she was so damned pissed about her glasses that she ignored it. The woman who was always at the front – Debra could never remember her name – wasn’t there. Maybe she’d gone to lunch, but if so, someone should’ve been covering for her until she got back. At the very least, she could’ve left a note that said when she’d return. But there was nothing. The woman’s absence irritated her. She’d hoped to ask her if anyone had found her reading glasses and turned them in. She had no intention of taking a seat in the waiting area and flipping through old magazines with wrinkled covers and torn pages until the woman returned. Debra had things to do. She had a life.

Fuck it.

She walked around the semicircular counter, intending to look for her glasses herself, go through every drawer if she had to. But when she got to the other side,