Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (3 page)

In all her nursing career, Joanna Watson had never once wished to trade places with the person on the operating table. But she supposed there was a first time for everything. Because at that moment, Joanna would have given anything to trade places with Jonah Jones, the twenty-year-old college student who lay unconscious on the operating table with pieces of his femur sticking out of his leg in three separate places. At least
he
was enjoying some peace and quiet underneath all that anesthesia.

Unlike Joanna.

“THIS IS NOT THE RETRACTOR I ASKED FOR!” Dr. Wilkinson boomed at her, loud enough to wake up all the patients in Recovery next door.

“Yes, it is, Dr. Wilkinson,” she replied coolly. “You asked for the eight-centimeter. That’s exactly what I gave you.”

“Watson, I thought you were supposed to be the best surgical nurse on staff here,” Mr. Personality growled. “If that were true, then you would know that I didn’t
mean
the eight-centimeter, I meant the
eighteen
centimeter. Any idiot could see that an eight-centimeter is too small for the area I’m working on right now.”

“Any idiot could ask for the right size retractor, too,” Joanna seethed, handing him the correct one.

Joanna glanced over at Shirley Daniels, the petite nurse-anesthetist on this operation, and noticed that the woman was red in the face. A fine sheen of perspiration stood out on her forehead, and she was breathing heavily. “Is the patient showing any sign of awareness, doctor?” Shirley stammered in a deep, husky voice not at all like her usual businesslike tone in the OR.

For a moment, Joanna thought the woman sounded really turned on—almost like someone you’d hear on a phone sex line. But then Joanna thought better of it. She was probably just imagining things. After all, Shirley Daniels wasn’t exactly known around town for having a social life, let alone as someone who got sexed up in the OR. But still—

“I’m sure the patient will let us know if he wakes up, damn it.” Dr. Wilkinson’s harsh Yankee growl broke Joanna out of her reverie. She flinched, but out of the corner of her eye, Joanna thought she could see the corners of Shirley’s eyes pointing upward behind her mask—that and the sex flush fast showing itself on her forehead indicated the usually reserved, uptight woman was feeling naughty.

Shirley Daniels was getting off on Dr. Wilkinson’s rude remarks. And Joanna didn’t like it one bit.

What the hell was going on?

Joanna felt a sharp jab of jealously in her belly. She shook her head violently back and forth, trying to clear it of any and all sexual thoughts. She couldn’t lose her concentration in the OR over a petty romantic rivalry with another nurse. A patient’s life was at stake, after all. And it wasn’t as if Joanna really had much of a claim on Dr. Wilkinson anyway. One casual fuck in an elevator didn’t exactly add up to a romantic relationship.

“Where the hell’s the hook scissors I asked you for five minutes ago, Watson?” Dr. Wilkinson snarled as he manipulated one of poor Jonah Jones’ broken femur ends back into place. “Are you daydreaming, or what?”

“You never asked me for any hook scissors, Doctor.” Joanna ground her teeth behind her paper mask again, and felt her own cheeks grow hot. “But perhaps you were just
thinking
about how you needed them five minutes ago and assumed I had read your mind.” Joanna took care to hold her Carolina twang in check, and this time she actually managed to sound a little mean.

Her change in tone seemed to have worked. Dr. Wilkinson’s eyes widened slightly underneath the clear plastic face screen that protected his eyes from blood and debris. Although his paper surgical mask covered most of his features, Joanna could tell from the pinching corners of his deep-blue eyes that he was smiling a little. “A good nurse is
always
capable of reading a surgeon’s mind, Watson,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Daniels?”

“Oh
yes
, Doctor,” Shirley replied, her voice deep and sultry. Now there was no mistaking what that woman had on her mind.

Joanna bit her lip as she felt her crotch heating up. The whole situation was getting ridiculous. She suddenly felt as if she were working on the set of
Gray’s Anatomy
instead of a conservative, underfunded rural hospital where sex was always the last possible thing on anyone’s mind.

Her hand hovered over the sterile surgical tool tray. “Was it the number six hook scissors you wanted, Doctor, or the number eight?”

“Eight,” Dr. Wilkinson replied as he took the scissors from her and used them to clip off the thread he was using to stitch a broken blood vessel. When he was finished, he handed them back to Joanna. When the scissors landed in her palm, Dr. Wilkinson’s ice-blue eyes met hers. “Thank you,” he said, his voice much calmer and gentler than before.

She’d tamed the man a bit.

Touché, Joanna
.

“I’ll be ready to insert the first rod in just a minute,” he said. “Do you have it ready?”

“Yes, Doctor, it’s right here. Already sterile.”

“What about the Steinmann pins?” Dr. Wilkinson was still staring straight into Joanna’s eyes. It made her uneasy, but she stared straight back, hard and without blinking. The same stomach quavering she’d felt back in the elevator returned suddenly, startling her so much she almost upset the surgical tool tray.

“Watson?” Dr. Wilkinson barked, his voice taking on its familiar angry edge again. “I asked you a question.”

Joanna broke off her return stare and shook her head rapidly to regain her composure. “S-sorry. The Steinmann pins are also here and ready. I have twelve of them—the nine you asked for, plus three extra, just in case.”

Dr. Wilkinson did a double-take. “Just in case of what?”

Joanna sucked in her breath again before answering. “Just in case you break one,” she said. “It’s been known to happen.”

Dr. Wilkinson scoffed. “Ha. Not on my watch.” All sign of the calmer, gentler self he’d revealed moments ago were gone. “I’ve never broken a pin in my entire goddamn career, and I don’t expect to start now.”

McDreamy the man definitely was not.

So much for being transplanted onto the
Gray’s Anatomy
set.

Joanna bit her tongue to keep from laughing. Obviously Mr. Personality here thought he was incapable of ever making a mistake in the OR, even such a common one as breaking a Steinmann pin while inserting it into a broken femur bone. Steinmann pins often snapped the first time a surgeon tried to insert them into a young person’s strong bones—they were originally designed for mending the brittle bones of the elderly, not the rock-hard, solid ones of drunken fratboys who had fallen from three stories.

Dr. Wilkinson aligned the two remaining sections of femur into something sort of resembling a normal leg. “Now it’s time to place the external fixator. Watson, please hand me the Wagner device.”

Joanna took up the heavy, metal-and-plastic Wagner device. Joanna knew that the proper way to apply an external fixator on a femur break was to wait until
after
the rods and Steinmann pins were inserted, stabilized, and most of the incision stitched up—not the other way around, as it appeared Dr. Wilkinson wanted to do. She hesitated.

“Watson, I asked you to hand me the damn Wagner device.”

“No.”

Dr. Wilkinson dropped his scalpel. It clattered to the tiled operating room floor. “Excuse me?”

“I said,
no
, Doctor.”

Dr. Wilkinson snatched the unwieldy thing right out of Joanna’s hands. “You want to change that answer, Watson?”

“No, Doctor, I don’t. I feel it is my duty to inform you that usual procedure on femur repair operations is to insert the Steinmann pins, rods, and intermedullary screws
before
you apply external fixation.” Joanna had to force these words from her lips. She had broken out into a cold sweat. It was all she could do to keep from fainting as she prepared herself for Dr. Wilkinson’s surely coming verbal assault. Still, even as she shivered in fear, her crotch temperature reached a boiling point.

Dr. Wilkinson’s glacial eyes bore into her. “Just who exactly is the surgeon in here, Watson?”

“With all due respect, Doctor, I assisted Army orthopaedists on several femur repair operations on young men like this when I was working at Walter Reed. A lot of kids coming back from Desert Storm broke their femurs falling off tanks and jumping out of planes. So I am more than familiar with standard procedure on surgeries like this.” Joanna set her jaw, fully expecting to be sworn at.

Dr. Wilkinson’s grip on the Wagner device loosened. In a move that stunned both Joanna and Shirley, he walked over to Joanna’s side of the operating table and replaced the device on its tray, then stepped back over to the spot where he’d been working. The two nurses watched his every move, breathless.

The surgeon’s icy gaze locked with Joanna’s bright green eyes. “Good answer, Watson. I can see why you’re so well-respected around here.”

Joanna’s jade eyes flew wide in surprise. “I—what?”

“I said,
good answer
. You just passed your first test, Watson. I give a lot of pop quizzes in the OR, by the way. I like to keep my nurses on their toes.”

Joanna breathed out a heavy sigh. She certainly hoped there wouldn’t be any more “pop quizzes” tonight. The tension in the OR’s sterile air was already thick enough as it was. And Dr. Wilkinson’s—Harlan’s—ice-blue stare was penetrating her.

Literally.

Joanna knew that behind the sterile surgical mask and face screen, the abrasive surgeon was undressing her with his eyes. Joanna could feel her cunt melting as she remembered their hot, anonymous tryst in the elevator, her body shuddering with the memory of those earth-shattering orgasms that still had her wet between the legs. She wanted to get the feeling of Harlan’s thick, throbbing cock inside her back, if only for a moment. . .

Joanna bit her lip underneath her mask hard enough to draw blood.
Stop it
, she thought to herself.
This is an operating room, not a sex chamber. Stop having these unladylike thoughts
this instant.

“Watson? Are you all right?” Dr. Wilkinson’s voice startled Joanna back to reality.

“Y-yes, Doctor,” she stammered. “Shall I get you a new scalpel? The one you dropped is no longer sterile.”

“Yes, do that, Joanna,” Dr. Wilkinson said, using her given name for the first time since the operation began. The sound of her name escaping his lips was enough to set her cheeks aflame. She took several long, slow, deep breaths, mentally instructing her face, mind, and body to calm down, cool off, and get back to the task at hand.

Her face, mind, and body all refused.

It was going to be a very, very long operation.

“God, I thought we were never going to get out of there,” Joanna sighed to Shirley in the nurses’ locker room once the operation was finally over.

Joanna glanced at her watch and noticed it was almost one a.m. She desperately needed to get some sleep, but there were still two hours left in her shift. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more drunken fratboys coming in with broken legs this evening. After steeling herself against Harlan’s piercing gaze in the OR for over four hours, it was all she could do just to keep her eyes open. She shucked off her dirty scrubs and stepped into the shower, turning the faucet all the way over to “COLD” in hopes it would wake her up. Not to mention calm her down.

“That man is evil,” groaned Shirley, who had just stepped into the shower stall next to Joanna. A vaguely medicinal scent wafted over the ceramic stall divider as Shirley rinsed off the residue from the anesthesia machine. “Pure, unadulterated evil.”

And in more ways than one
, Shirley thought silently to herself, feeling her crotch go hot once more.

Joanna shivered under her own ice-cold shower stream—a futile attempt to keep her own raging libido at bay. “The guy’s definitely obnoxious,” she agreed. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to call him
evil
.”

Being a proper Southern lady, Joanna couldn’t exactly call a man she’d just done the Wild Thing with evil. Course, ill-mannered, slimy, manipulative, and rude she could do. But not
evil
.

“Well, if I ever get spoken to like that in the OR again so help me God I will quit,” Shirley hissed. “They don’t pay me enough to put up with that kind of crap from anybody. I don’t care how famous Dr. Wilkinson is—he needs to learn some manners.”

Joanna shut off the tap with a jerk. She grabbed her towel and stepped out of her stall, then yanked open the curtain to Shirley’s stall, nearly startling the poor naked woman out of her skin. “What’s that? You say Dr. Wilkinson is
famous
?”

Shirley shut off her own faucet and wrapped herself in a towel. “Well,
duh.
What rock have you been hiding under, Joanna?”

Joanna scanned the files of her brain for her short list of world-famous surgeons. Dr. Harlan Wilkinson wasn’t on it. Dr. Turnblatt had been well-respected in and around the greater Raleigh-Durham metro region, but wasn’t much known beyond that. Most of the other “famous” surgeons she’d heard of were nothing more than names of long-dead men in the pages of her dusty nursing texts, and most of them were from New York or New England, not her humble little hamlet of Statesville, North Carolina.

“Pardon me, Shirley, but I’ve never heard of Dr. Wilkinson before today. I guess I must have missed all his appearances on David Letterman, or whatever it is famous surgeons do to promote themselves these days.”

Shirley sighed and shook her head as she tugged on a fresh set of scrubs. “Dr. Harlan Wilkinson is one of the most pre-eminent general surgeons in the entire country. Maybe even the world. He was on staff at Hofts University Medical Center in Boston before he came here. He’s gotten recognition all over the world for his research. Plus, he spent time in Doctors without Borders, serving in Somalia and Sierra Leone—“

Joanna put her hands on her still-damp hips. “How do you know all of this?”

Shirley rolled her eyes as she toweled herself off. “Joanna, it’s only been the number-one topic of conversation around the hospital for the past month. Don’t you pay attention at all? The hospital newsletter did a big spread on Dr. Wilkinson last month. You didn’t see it?”

Between her double-overtime shifts under Doctor Turnblatt and the final stages of her divorce proceedings, Joanna hadn’t paid much attention to the news. “I suppose not,” she replied as she plucked a fresh set of scrubs from the hamper and tugged them on.

Shirley giggled. “Then I guess you didn’t see the picture of him on the back of a Land Rover somewhere in the middle of Africa with his shirt off.
Yummy
.”

Did that remark mean Shirley was homing in on Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s sex appeal too?

How
dare
she
! Joanna thought.
That little
bitch
—

Whoa. Wait a minute. Was it really possible that Joanna could she be that jealous and possessive of Harlan after
one
anonymous elevator fuck? By the way her eyes and back of her throat were burning, it certainly seemed that way. “I thought you said you didn’t like him,” she snapped, her voice almost a snarl.

“Oh, I don’t,” Shirley answered, slamming her locker shut. “Like I said, if you ask me, the man is pure, unadulterated evil. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s smoking-hot. I mean, you’d practically have to be blind not to notice
that
about him.”

Shirley certainly had a point there.

And Joanna was silently cursing herself for having fucked the man in total darkness, thereby missing out on the treat of actually seeing Harlan Wilkinson’s body in its delicious
au natural
state.

“It’s really a shame a gorgeous male physique like that is wasted on such a jerk,” Shirley commented. “Don’t you think so?”

Joanna didn’t answer. Her cheeks smarting, she just smiled a big, fake, shit-eating grin and stomped out of the locker room.

Joanna plodded down the hallway towards the main nurses’ station, grinding her teeth. What a mortifying nursing shift she’d just had! Not only was she getting screwed out of the precious time off the hospital had been promising her for months, she’d managed to screw her new boss’ brains out, too. And now, the man whom she’d bestowed her precious sexual favors upon was screwing around with her mind—pretending like the whole thing never happened at all!

Joanna’s stomach churned at the notion of having to set eyes on Dr. Harlan Wilkinson again. At one level, the man made her sick. And at another, the man made her want to take her panties off in public.

It was enough to make a girl get all hot and bothered.

As much as Joanna wanted to dash out of the hospital (so she could crawl under the nearest rock and die), that was impossible. With two hours left on her shift, Joanna had to get back to work, like it or not—or else Mr. Personality just might make good on his promise to write her up for disciplinary action.

Joanna shuddered to think at just what that writeup would look like in her Personnel file.

It would probably go something like this: “I, Harlan Wilkinson, MD, wish to formally reprimand Joanna Watson, RN, for getting snippy with me in the OR because I pretended we hadn’t just fucked each others’ brains out five minutes before conducting our first surgical operation together.”

That wouldn’t exactly help her come annual raise time, would it?

Joanna made a mental note to start working on her resume.

****

The rest of Joanna’s shift passed without incident. She remained on call at her station just outside the main operating room, in a fresh set of sterile scrubs just in case she should be called back in for any emergency surgeries. She kept her eyes glued to a television mounted on the recovery room wall, staring at the late-night infomercial it blared at full volume in hopes that it would serve as enough stimulus to keep her awake for just a few hours more. By 1:45 am, her eyes were bloodshot, her eyelids heavy, and her head was throbbing with a migraine.

Her crotch was throbbing, too. Her body was making it clear to her that it wanted another dose of the very special medicine that Dr. Harlan Wilkinson had served up to her in the elevator hours before.

Damn it. That was the last thing she needed right now.

At 1:57, Joanna figured she was safe to pack up and go home. She was exhausted. And even if she got home quickly, she’d only have about five hours to sleep before having to report back to the hospital for her next regular shift.

Joanna flipped the television off and started walking back towards the nurses’ locker room to gather her things. But she hadn’t made it three steps before she heard a gruff voice echo on the linoleum just behind her.

“You still have two minutes left on your shift, Watson.”

Joanna spun around. Harlan’s azure eyes were bright as lasers even in the dimmed hallway lights, and they bore into her like knives. “Oh, come on, Doctor. I’ve been on duty for sixteen straight hours. Two minutes aren’t that big a deal at this point—“

Harlan’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, they are. In medicine, every minute—every
second
—counts. Those two extra minutes you spend hightailing it out of here could be the difference between life and death for a patient who arrives in the surgery department with a hemorrhaging artery.”

“With all due respect, Doctor, I don’t see any hemorrhaging patients hereabouts,” Joanna replied coolly. “Do you?”

“That’s beside the point,” he said, taking a step closer to her. Even from more than ten feet away, she could swear she felt the heat rising from his body against the bare skin of her forearms, making her break out into girlish goose pimples. She absently rubbed at her arms—which only turned them into giant erogenous zones.

“Watson, what I’m trying to emphasize here is that I expect 100% from my nurses 100% of the time,” he barked. “No slacking off on my watch. Not even for two minutes.”

Joanna glanced at the gray steel clock mounted on the hallway wall. She watched as the second hand finished its rotation, then glanced back at Harlan, her eyes locking with his. “Well, the last two minutes of my shift are up. I don’t see any dying patients in the vicinity, and I also see my shift replacement coming around the corner. So if it will suit you and your out-of-control ego, Dr. Harlan Wilkinson, I will be going now. I have an urgent appointment with my bed.”

With that tender expression of Carolina hospitality, Joanna turned on her heel and headed back to the locker room without giving Harlan a second glance.

Four minutes later, Joanna was in the hospital parking garage. As she fumbled the key into the lock of her battered old Honda, she heard the heavy metal door of the stairwell slam shut, followed by the click of hard-soled shoes on asphalt. Momentarily terrified that a serial rapist had somehow followed her out to her car, Joanna froze, unable even to unlock the door to get into the relative safety of her vehicle.

“Relax,” came a familiar male voice from across the parking structure. “It’s just me, Watson. Believe it or not, my out-of-control ego and I have to sleep too.”

Joanna’s felt her cheeks color. Was there no escaping this man? She managed to get her car door open and tossed her purse and duffel bag into the passenger seat. She tried to coax her body into the car after them, but her feet had somehow glued themselves to the concrete floor of the parking garage.

And all at once, her entire lower half went into flames.

Joanna’s body was ripe and raring to go for another fuck, whether she liked it or not.

Harlan seemed to pick up on this right away. “So what’s the holdup, Watson?” he chuckled. “If you’re as tired as you say you are, why don’t you just go home?”

“I—“ was Joanna’s stammering reply. Her mouth went cottony when she caught sight of Harlan’s crotch. Even in the dim, smoky light of the darkened parking garage, Joanna could make out a tent in the man’s pants worthy of a three-ring circus.

Harlan inched closer. “You know, I’d really like to join you on that urgent appointment you have with your bed,” he said. “I think a nice long stay in your bed would do the both of us a world of good. Unless you’d prefer to get busy right here.”

Joanna stiffened. She tried once more to get in her car and drive away, and couldn’t. The more she stared at the enormous bulge in Harlan’s crotch, the more she wanted to stay right where she was so he could fuck her with it.

The whole situation was way out of hand.

Joanna slapped herself across the face. She had to nip this thing in the bud. She just
had
to. Joanna was a proper Southern lady. She had manners and decorum. She’d gone to her marriage bed a virgin, after all. What the hell was she doing in a parking garage in the middle of the night, seconds away from letting an arrogant, rude, uncivilized Yankee—not to mention her new boss—screw her brains out up against the side of a car?

And why the hell was she so damn excited at the prospect?

She was losing her mind.

Now Harlan’s body was pressed up against hers. She could feel his arousal, hard and throbbing and insistent against her left thigh. She could smell it, too—that unmistakable coppery, musky, manly scent of sex enveloped her like a fog. “So what’s it gonna be, Watson?” Harlan whispered. “Are we gonna do this thing, or are we just gonna call it a night and go home?”

“I—I don’t know,” she stammered. And it was true. She was at a total loss. Did she listen to her heaving body and slippery crotch and take the sexual satisfaction that was being served up to her on a platter, or did she do the rational, reasonable thing and get the hell away from there?

It was pretty hard to listen to reason when her crotch was on fire.

Joanna’s vagina vibrated from the intense need to be filled with Harlan’s cock, and her clit buzzed in anticipation of Harlan’s skilled surgeon’s fingers upon it. The instincts driving Joanna’s actions that night were purely primal—raw, animalistic, primitive. They made no sense, but they didn’t have to.