Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (17 page)

“Where are you taking me?” Joanna asked as Harlan drove her in his car—a silver Jaguar convertible—along a deserted mountain road. He’d kept the top up so far, something Joanna was thankful for given the early-spring chill. Her Honda was still back at the hospital garage.

“Somewhere where nobody will see us. That’s what you want, right?”

“Yes,” she said, examining her hands. They were shaking.

“Middleton talked to you too, didn’t he?” Harlan shifted gears and accelerated up a steep grade, never once taking his eyes off the road.

“Yes, he did.”

“It seems a lot of people are talking about us, Joanna. Maybe you could explain why.”

Joanna looked down at her hands again. Now they were vibrating. And her crotch was somewhere in volcano territory. She interlaced her fingers and made a double fist, clenching it into the hollow of her lap in a vain attempt to settle her buzzing body down. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, first, somebody on staff at the hospital says we’re banging each other at work against hospital policy—which, technically we are. And now your ex-husband’s lawyer calls the hospital and says the same thing. What’s your ex-husband got to do with hospital regulations, anyway?”

“I have no idea,” she replied. And it was the truth.

“Well, something fishy is definitely going on,” Harlan said. He shifted gears and started to slow the car.

“Why are you slowing down?” Joanna asked, alarmed.

“We’re getting close to my house.” Harlan turned left sharply onto an unmarked gravel driveway almost hidden by trees, kudzu, and undergrowth. He followed its meandering, uneven path for almost a mile up the mountainside, until they came upon a small, saltbox-style A-frame lodge that jutted itself partway off a cliff. A deep, narrow ravine separated the house from the driveway. Joanna noted that the entire eastern wall of the house—the part that seemed seconds away from falling down the mountainside—was made almost entirely of glass. A long wooden catwalk with six-foot-high railings led across the ravine and up to the house. The place was all sharp angles, invisible foundation, and improbable location—not unlike Dr. Harlan Wilkinson himself.

“This is it, Joanna. What do you think?”

“It’s. . .interesting,” was the only comment Joanna could manage.

“And remote,” he finished. “That’s what I like most about it. Nobody knows it’s up here except my housekeeper. The electricity runs on a generator, and I have well water. So no public utilities. I take my garbage down the mountain—or rather, my housekeeper does—twice a week, so no trash service to know that it’s here. My mail doesn’t come here, either. My cell phone gets a signal up here most of the time, except when it storms, but there’s no land line telephone service up this high. It’s the utmost in privacy.”

“I see,” Joanna said, wondering why on earth Harlan would want to live in such utter isolation from the world. “Did you build it yourself?”

“No, I bought it several years ago from some crazy survivalist guy,” Harlan explained. “He
did
build it himself. Apparently he worked as an architect before he became a crazy survivalist. He only lived in it for a year, then left it vacant.”

“Uh huh,” Joanna said, chuckling. “Apparently he didn’t survive out here very long, then.”

“Nope, he fell down the mountainside, broke his leg in three places, and had to go move in with his daughter in Raleigh.” He laughed. “I used to come down here from Boston once or twice a year for hunting trips, but when I took the job at Covington—well, it made for a perfect full-time home.” Harlan walked down the catwalk towards the front door, and Joanna followed him inside.

The view from the lodge’s floor-to-ceiling glass wall was magnificent. The entire Blue Ridge range was visible from this altitude, and all the colors of a North Carolina mountain spring laid themselves out across every hill and valley. Joanna wasn’t sure, but she thought she could see all the way to the Tennessee state line. “It’s a wonderful view,” she breathed, captivated

“That’s exactly why I bought the place,” Harlan said.

Harlan squeezed her shoulders hard, bringing Joanna partially out of her reverie. “Joanna, if we make love here, nobody at work will ever know. I promise you.”

“I—“ Joanna split away from him, bit at her thumbnail like a gawky girl. “I don’t know, Harlan. I think there’s something strange going on. There are people who don’t want to see us happy together.” Like Shirley Daniels. Like her ex-husband.

“Do you really care what anybody else thinks?” Harlan folded his arms across his broad chest, cocked his head to one side. “Tell me the truth.”

“No, I don’t. But that doesn’t change the facts at hand.” Joanna’s breathing came in hot, heavy spurts. Her upper body felt heavy and warm, her nether parts were molten steel. Her nipples were quartz crystals that threatened to shred the front of her thin cotton scrub blouse. Joanna’s body was ready to have sex with this man, certainly. But her mind wasn’t. Her heart wasn’t, either. Her mind was too full of questions, her heart too full of doubts. What was he hiding from her? What wrongs had he done, and did he really intend to tell her about them?

“Penny for your thoughts,” Harlan whispered, only inches away from her ear. She was so lost in her spiraling thoughts that he had slid his strong arms around her waist without her even noticing.

This man had too much power over her, far too much.

“Are you going to tell me all the things you’ve done wrong?” she asked, still not quite ready to pull herself from his embrace.

“I’ll tell you after we have sex,” he whispered, nibbling at her ear. “
While
we have sex, if you prefer.”

As tantalizing as Harlan’s suggestion was, Joanna knew it was impossible. She broke away from him, crossed to the far side of the room. “I need you to tell me everything first,” she said. “
All
of it. Tell me everything, or there won’t ever be anything between us. We have to be honest with each other, Harlan.”

Harlan looked wounded. “Why are you so insistent that I tell you everything, Joanna? I haven’t made that demand of you.”

Joanna took a deep breath before replying. “I want to know what it is that makes you so angry and mean all the time.”

Harlan’s eyes flew wide. “Excuse me?”

“That’s right,” Joanna said, triumphant. “You’re mean.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Please. Have you ever listened to yourself in the OR? You give new meaning to the word arrogant
.”
Joanna flopped down in one of the lodge’s many beanbag-style chairs. “Most of my fellow nurses have quit rather than put up with you. You’re mean, and rude, and obnoxious, and foul-mouthed, and—“

“An SOB?” To Joanna’s surprise, Harlan was smiling.

“Yes, you’re definitely an SOB. You know what the other nurses call you behind your back?”

Harlan’s grin widened. “I can only imagine. What?”

“Darth Vader.”

Joanna expected Harlan to be angry at this, but he just laughed. “Actually, I’m probably closer to Palpatine.”

Joanna’s
Star Wars
knowledge didn’t include anyone named Palpatine. “Which one’s Palpatine?”

“You know, the Emperor. He’s the one with the melted face in
Return of the Jedi
.”

“Oh,” Joanna muttered, embarrassed. “Right.” Dr. Harlan Wilkinson had one-upped her once again.

“Did
you
ever call me Darth Vader, Joanna?”

Joanna smirked a little. “Actually, I thought ‘Darth Vader’ was too kind a nickname for you. You remind me more of Attila the Hun.”

“Fair enough. I’ve never been very sociable, even when I was a kid,” Harlan said, sitting down in the beanbag chair opposite Joanna.

“It shows,” Joanna remarked.

“Look Joanna, if you really want to hear what I have to say, you’ll need to keep the sarcastic comments to a minimum. I haven’t made many demands of you—“

“I beg to differ on that. You’ve made
plenty
of demands, Harlan. Would you like me to list them for you?”

Harlan sighed. “Fine. Point taken.” He walked back over to her. In a single, brilliant move, Harlan straddled her, leaning over so that his bulging crotch was right on top of her bosom. He took hold of her face with his left hand, drawing it close to his, millimeters away from a kiss. But instead of kissing her, he said, “Promise me something, Joanna. Please.”

“What?” Joanna could feel his hot breath against her cheeks, her forehead, her neck. With every tickle of his breathing on her skin, her desire for him intensified.

“When I’m done telling this story, let me fuck you.”

Joanna smiled. But she didn’t answer. Joanna liked the idea of holding Harlan at bay. It made her feel powerful.

“Let me put it in nicer terms, then,” Harlan said. “Please, Joanna, let me make love to you,” he begged, thrusting his swollen crotch in her face. “I want to come inside you tonight. The wait is absolutely killing me.”

“We’ll see,” Joanna said, giving Harlan a gentle shove that sent him toppling onto the floor. “Now tell me about all the bad things you’ve done.”

Harlan pulled a longneck Michelob from his kitchen’s glossy black Subzero fridge and took a long, slow sip. “All right, Joanna. Here’s my story. And when it gets really ugly, disgusting, and horrible to listen to, just remember—you asked for it.”

“Actually,
you’re
the one who brought up your deep, dark past in the first place,” Joanna corrected. “But I know now you only wanted to use it to seduce me.”

“Guilty as charged.” Harlan finished the beer, then erupted in a loud burp. “There. That’s payback for the Red Bull in the break room this morning.”

“My burp was much better.” Joanna settled deeper into her beanbag chair. “More ladylike, anyway. How about bringing me one of those?” she asked, pointing at his already guzzled Michelob. He pulled another out of the fridge and tossed it at her from behind the galley kitchen’s half-wall. She caught it in her right hand effortlessly.

“Nice catch,” Harlan observed. He pulled another beer out of the Subzero, popped off the cap, and downed almost half of it in one swallow. “With those reflexes, you could play in the majors.”

“I played softball in high school. Center field. By the way, Harlan, you’re stalling.”

“Right.” He inhaled the remains of his second beer in as many minutes, and tossed both empties into the trash. He pulled a ladder-backed chair from the dinette set, and straddled it backwards, chinning the chair’s top rung. “I told you that I did some work with Doctors Without Borders, right?”

“Yes. You nailed the woman who later became your wife while on assignment in the Sudan, as I recall.” Joanna shook her head and sighed. Harlan had to be the only physician on the planet who would use a Nobel-Prize-winning aid group for sexual purposes.

“You have a good memory. I like that in a woman.” Harlan gave her a suggestive look; Joanna ignored it. “I loved the time I spent in Doctors Without Borders. Helping people who desperately needed help gave me self-worth and confidence that I’d never known before.” Harlan paused. A look of pain briefly crossed his chiseled features, then disappeared. “You see, I was a quiet kid. An introvert, really. I liked to read and fiddle around in my room with my chemistry set and Tinkertoys. I liked making messes and building things, preferably alone. I never had many friends. Not because I couldn’t make them, but because I usually had more fun playing by myself. Playing with other kids meant you had to share, meant you had to compromise. I don’t like to compromise. Never have.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Joanna chirped.

Harlan blinked. “I consider my inflexibility a strength, frankly.”

Joanna rolled her eyes. “You’re stalling again, Harlan. I haven’t got all day, you know.”

Harlan got up from his chair so fast he knocked it over. He began to pace up and down the room. “I first met Emma Swanson in 1993. She was assigned to Hofts for her last two years of graduate fellowship training in internal medicine. Since she was an internist and I was in the Surgery department, we didn’t interact much. We crossed paths only a few times that first year, but my attraction to her was almost instantaneous. She was beautiful in a way that most women doctors doing their residencies and fellowships simply can’t be—the long hours, the lack of sleep, and the bad food usually wreck your skin and make your hair fall out. But not Emma. The woman could work a 36-hour shift straight through without sleeping and still come out looking like a runway model.

“I was smitten with Emma from the beginning, but I didn’t have the opportunity to tell her so. Truth be told, I was terrified of her.” Harlan stopped pacing for a moment, and stopped to catch his breath.

“About eight months after I met Emma, I called the attending physician in charge of Emma’s fellowship program and asked if I could take her to lunch. I told him that I was starting a mentoring program between the Surgery department and the non-surgical specialties, which was complete bullshit of course. But it got me an opportunity to talk to Emma alone, outside the hospital.

“Emma was an MD fellowship recipient only a year or so away from passing her final boards, not a green first-year resident. So it technically wasn’t against regulations for us to date—even if it would be frowned upon. I thought I’d be all smooth and slick with Emma at the lunch, maybe even have her in my bed by dinnertime. But boy, was I wrong. The woman was a force of nature. One look at her, I could barely even remember my name. She’d spent a year between med school and residency training in the Sudan working for Doctors Without Borders. I think she knew I had a crush on her, and used that to full advantage—by the end of our lunch, Emma had me hook, line, and sinker. I barely knew the woman, and in the space of thirty minutes, she’d managed to get me to agree to accompany her to the Sudan for her next three-month tour of duty, which would begin in no less than three weeks.”

“Wow.” Joanna was touched. “Emma really must have been something.”

“You bet she was. Why the hell else do you think I went halfway around the world at the drop of a hat just to get a better chance of sleeping with her?”

Joanna wondered if Harlan would ever consider doing the same for her. She doubted it.

“I put in for a three-month leave of absence that very afternoon,” Harlan went on. “The chief surgeon wasn’t happy about losing me on such short notice, but the hospital administration was thrilled at the idea. Good publicity, and all that.

“I didn’t get much chance to speak with Emma at all until the day before we were supposed to leave. She called me at home the night before our flight, offering to give me a ride to the airport. I wanted to ask her to dinner that night, but I clammed up completely when she called. I stayed clammed up the next day for the entire flight to Egypt. There are no commercial flights in or out of the Sudan, so Emma, me, and some of the other doctors assigned to our volunteer group made the crossing into the Sudan on armored Land Rovers. Emma and I shared the backseat of one of the Land Rovers for an eighteen-hour trip, and it was during that long, bumpy drive that I finally was able to loosen up around her. We ended up talking for almost the whole time.

“Within days, we were inseparable. We actually got married while we were in the Sudan. There was a Catholic priest in one of the refugee camps who married us. Neither of us were Catholic, but that didn’t matter to us. That first tour of duty I spent there was the happiest time of my life.”

Harlan sighed. A look of nostalgia mixed with regret began to build in his blue eyes; Joanna saw the lines around them deepen. At last, she was getting a glimpse of the source of this man’s pain. Obviously something awful had happened to Emma, this woman he had loved so fully. But what?

“That first tour of duty was relatively calm, since there was a cease-fire in place. But there was still plenty of work for me to do. I treated mine victims, amputees, burn victims. Also lots of tropical diseases and cholera. But Emma was in her element the whole time. Treating and soothing the most desperate people on Earth—it was what Emma was born to do.”

“The two of us returned to Hofts a married couple, not to mention miniature celebrities. We raised a few eyebrows around the hospital with our quickie marriage, but that was about it. It was over and done with, and nobody tried to wave any stupid employee dating policies in our faces. Emma went back to finishing her fellowship, and I started publishing research based on some field surgery techniques I’d learned in the Army and then modified in the Sudan.

“That’s when my research on infection control under the poorest of battlefield conditions got started. . Along with publishing my research findings, I started developing inexpensive, contamination-proof field hospital supplies for use in developing countries—supplies that were cheap and easy for poor countries to produce and buy. I owned fifty percent of the patent royalties on everything I invented, with the other half going to Hofts. It made me a very, very wealthy man in more ways than one. For the first time ever, I had riches, I had love, and I had satisfaction in the work I was doing. And Emma was responsible for every bit of that.”

“She certainly sounds like a wonderful person,” Joanna sighed. “I’ve—enjoyed hearing about her. But I thought you were going to tell me about all the wrongs you’ve done. It doesn’t sound to me like you’ve done any.”

Harlan went back to pacing the room. “Emma and I had a few very good years together. We went on assignment with DWB together at least once a year. After two more tours in the Sudan, on our fourth tour, we were assigned to a new DWB project in Sierra Leone, another war-town, poor African country. The whole country was in chaos. Our refugee camp in Freetown was surrounded by soldiers and guerrillas who were always at each others’ throats. Gunfire and bombs were commonplace just outside the fence.

“By the time we’d been in Freetown three months, the Revolutionary United Front had attacked our camp and hospital nine times. Time and again, our hospitals were raided, our medical supplies stolen. Many of the Westerners in other camps were captured and then held for ransom, if they were lucky enough not to be killed first. But Emma and I and all the other doctors, nurses, and aid workers in our camp were pretty much left alone. But after three months, the fighting around us intensified and things got a lot worse.”

Joanna gasped. She knew what must have happened next. “Something happened to Emma there. Isn’t that right?”

Harlan nodded. He stopped pacing and sat down beside her, leaned his head against her left breast. He cupped it gently into his left hand, squeezing and then stroking her taut nipple through the thin cotton of her scrub blouse. “Yes,” he whispered. Joanna’s breath caught in the back of her throat. She felt empathy for this man, deep empathy. Deep empathy, and deep attraction. Joanna found it harder and harder to resist the urges she felt tightening her stomach, melting her thighs, warming her heart at Harlan’s touch. She had to help him, to comfort him, to ease his pain. And ease her own pain as well.

“Harlan, tell me what happened to Emma.”

Harlan kept his face buried in Joanna’s bosom for almost a full minute. Then he jerked away, and walked over to the two-story window. The first shadows of twilight were falling. As the sun began its final move towards setting behind the Blue Ridge horizon, Harlan spoke.

“Our tour of duty was almost over when it all went down. Things had gotten so bad we didn’t dare leave the center of camp, not even for a few minutes. Some nights we both slept in the hospital tent rather than go back to our quarters, which were too close to the edge of camp for our liking when the skirmishes were close.

“Emma was pregnant. We’d just found out a week earlier, and both of us were ecstatic. But we were counting the days until we could get the hell out of Sierra Leone, too. The climate and the dangers of the camp wore hard on Emma, and she also had very bad morning sickness. I’d been working a double-shift in the clinic when Nihone, a local nurse who lived in our camp, burst into my office.

“Nihone broke the news that a pack of RUF mercenaries had just gotten into camp. They’d kidnapped several Westerners and refugees before they stole one of our Land Rovers and took off. One of the kidnapped Westerners was my wife. They’d taken her from our tent, where she’d been resting.”

Joanna sucked in her breath. “Oh God, Harlan.”

“Of course, then all hell broke loose. Those of us left behind tried to determine what would be the safest bet for retrieving our people. We decided based on the previous kidnappings of Westerners in and around Freetown that the best thing to do, at least for the first 24 hours, was wait for ransom notes. When the notes came, we’d probably be able to figure out where RUF was holding everyone and then do a rescue on the pretense of bringing ransom money. But 24 hours came and went, then 48, and no ransom notes ever arrived. After three more days, somebody dumped all the bodies of the kidnapped outside our camp gate. Emma’s body was there with them.”

Tears spilled onto Joanna’s cheeks. She couldn’t imagine the pain, the grief, the horror that must torment Harlan’s soul day and night.

“Joanna, It was my fault. I told Emma it was safe that night to sleep in our tent instead of at the hospital, and it wasn’t. I failed her.”

Joanna rushed over to Harlan and threw her arms around him. He collapsed against her into sobs. She stroked his hair, rocked him back and forth. “It’s all right, Harlan. It wasn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing—“

“It
was
my fault,” he barked through his tears. “I slacked off. I didn’t pay attention to how close the fighting had gotten. I knew better than to tell her to sleep alone in our tent. I failed her, Joanna. I failed the woman I loved.”

“Hush,” Joanna cooed, and rocked him back and forth some more. “Hush. I’m sure that wherever she is now, Emma knows you didn’t fail her. She knows that you loved her. I know it, too.”

Harlan broke away from Joanna’s embrace and flopped back into one of the beanbag chairs. He covered his face in his hands for a moment, rubbing his closed eyelids. Then he looked up. “There’s a lot more to this story. Failing Emma wasn’t the only bad thing I’ve done.”

He stood up and began to pace again. “Given what happened, Doctors Without Borders gave me permission to go back to the States three weeks early. When I got back to Boston I tried to pretend everything was back to normal, but I just went through the motions each day as if I were in a dream. The first year or so I pretended like my whole marriage to Emma had never happened rather than deal with the loss. That worked for a while.