Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (31 page)

“Joanna Watson-Wilkinson now. And yeah, the press loved her. She’s gorgeous, for one thing. And she really played the damsel-in-distress role to the hilt.”

“That she did.”

“She married Dr. Wilkinson too, you know. And he of course got to keep all those patent royalties, plus collect a shitload of punitive damages on top of it. He was rich all along, but now he’s a gazillionaire. And Joanna gets to share her life with that man—and all his wealth.” Shirley paused and picked at her meal, having suddenly lost her appetite. “I know I should be happy for her, but I’m not. I’m still just jealous of everything she has.”

“So would a lot of people.”

“But you don’t understand! My parents didn’t raise me that way. I know that it’s wrong to be envious of other people, to covet what they have—let alone take revenge on them for it the way I did. But that doesn’t change the way I feel sometimes.” She sighed and hung her head. “You must think I’m a terrible person.”

“Not at all. On the contrary, I think you are a remarkably honest and forthright human being. Not many people are willing to admit their most personal faults out in the open to a total stranger like you just did.” Randall took a couple bites of tandoori chicken, chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. “Don’t beat yourself up so much. You know what you did was wrong, and it seems to me that you’ve more than atoned for it. If it still bothers you so much, sometimes it’s best to confront the person you wronged directly and tell her you’re sorry.”

Shirley dropped her fork. “Oh, no! That would never work!”

“It’s never too late to apologize. And you might be surprised just how gracious some people can be about it.”

She sighed, blinking back tears. “I’ve tried to apologize to her several times, actually. She’s not interested. She hates me, and I suppose she has good reason to.”

“Give her time. Maybe after she’s had a couple of years to cool off, have a couple of kids, she’ll be a little more open-minded.”

“I don’t think so.”

Randall reached across the table and put his large, strong hand over Shirley’s tiny, quivering one. “Shirley, I think the first thing you need to do is to forgive yourself. You’re only human. You made a mistake. So has every other human being ever to walk the surface of this planet. It doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself for the rest of your life.”

Shirley pondered this for a moment. He kept his warm, large hand cradled over hers, passed the tip of his forefinger back and forth over the soft, tender skin of her upper wrist. Even this slightest caress was erotic to the core. Bolts of electricity wound their way up her arm and down her torso until they merged and exploded between her legs. She felt her panties dampen as her juices began to flow. This man—this wonderful, sexy, enigmatic man, cared about her.
Really
cared. And now, he was touching her as only a lover would. “I guess I’ll try to forgive myself, then,” she whispered.

“Don’t try. Just
do
it. Right now. It’s easy.”

She screwed her eyes shut, visualized Joanna Watson-Wilkinson’s beautiful face. It appeared in her mind’s eye, and Shirley silently offered an apology. The phantom Joanna offered no sign of acknowledgment, but Shirley felt as if a huge burden was lifted from her shoulders almost immediately.

She opened her eyes, found that Randall was staring right into them. “Well?” he said. “Feel better?” He still hadn’t let go of her hand. In fact, he’d set down his fork and was now stroking her forearm with the other hand. The soft buzzing that had erupted between Shirley’s legs had grown into a full-blown explosion. She was on the verge of coming right here in the restaurant after just a minute or two of innocent handholding. If that’s what Randall could do to her at a dinner table, imagine what he would do to her once they got into bed together!

Assuming, of course, he
wanted
to go to bed with her.

Shirley couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. She needed to know where she stood with this man, damn it. Sure, a certain amount of mystery was attractive in a man, but there got to be a point where it could drive a girl insane. “Umm, Randall, ummm, I was kind of wondering,” she stammered, suddenly feeling like a teenager with a boarding-school crush. “How do you, ummm,
feel
about me?”

Randall’s eyes twinkled and he grinned, stepping up his caresses of her forearm. The feeling was like having a pack of fairies do a dance on her arm—pure magic. “Can you be more specific?” he teased. “Do you mean
feel
in the tactile sense or the emotional sense?”

“Please don’t turn this into another one of your jokes,” she snapped. “I’m out on a limb here, and if I don’t get an answer to that question very soon, I just might drop dead of a heart attack.”

“I see. Well, we can’t have you having a heart attack here at the only Indian restaurant in town. What would it do to their business? I’d probably be out of my only chance of getting decent tandoori chicken this side of Atlanta.”

“Randall, please—“

He put his index finger to her lips, shushing her. He squeezed her hand hard, sending bolts of heat up her arm and down her body, until both her legs trembled. The tension in her body built and built and built, climber higher and higher, until Shirley’s breath caught and a tiny whimper of ecstasy escaped her mouth. She was about to come, right here, right now in a public restaurant with at least two dozen other people watching, and this damned incorrigible man was still withholding his true feelings from her. The situation was beyond ridiculous. It was insane.

He smiled broader, seemed suddenly very interested in his cuticles. “You do realize that I’m a murder suspect, don’t you? One would think that would put a bit of a damper on any designs you might have on this body of mine.”

“I don’t believe you killed Enola Higginbottom for a minute,” she snapped. And it was true. She really didn’t think he had it in him.

“I appreciate that, Shirley. Because I promise you, I am wholly innocent of that crime. But unfortunately, at this point I can’t prove my innocence, which might end up being a bit of a problem with the police. Are you still interested in my answer?”

“Yes,” she growled. She was
damn
interested, in fact. She was so interested that if he didn’t give her the goods that instant, she was going to kick him right in the crotch.

“I could be arrested at any time, you know. Police could walk right into this restaurant in the next three minutes and put me in handcuffs.”

“I don’t care,”
Shirley hissed. Now she was desperate. So she might as well come right out and commit a desperate act. She leaned forward until her nose was mere inches away from Randall’s. The hem of her scrub shirt dipped into a bowl of lentil
dhal
soup, but she didn’t notice. “Randall,” she whispered. “If you don’t take me somewhere and fuck me in the next five minutes, I swear to God I will have to crawl away somewhere dark and hidden to kill myself.”

Randall leaned into her and kissed her passionately on the mouth. With tongue. Lots and lots of tongue. They didn’t come up for air for almost a full minute.

“Shirley, as a physician, it is part of my sworn Hippocratic oath to prevent suicide whenever possible. So I’m afraid I have no choice but to oblige your request.” He flagged a red-faced waiter. “Check please. The lady and I will take these lunches to go.”

Fourteen

Twenty minutes later, Shirley and Randall were at Randall’s sprawling Georgian Revival house, a white, pillared relic from before the Civil War. “The previous owner went bankrupt restoring it, so I got it cheap—relatively speaking,” he explained when Shirley gaped in awe at the two-story entry hall, complete with a winding staircase and stained-glass rotunda. “His loss was my gain.”

“Wow. It’s so beautiful—“

He put a finger to her lips. “
You’re
beautiful.” With that, Randall swept her up in his arms and carried her up the winding staircase. “We can discuss the history of my home later, madam. Right now I intend to take you upstairs and ravish you senseless.”

Very
Gone With The Wind
.

They made it to the top of the winding mahogany staircase. Randall carried her down a marble hall lined with gold-plated wall sconces, the kind that would originally have been for gaslights but were since retrofitted for electricity. The walls were paneled in buttery, polished walnut with gold inlay, and the ceiling was painted with ornate Renaissance-style murals depicting golden cherubs flying through a starry sky. The opulence surrounding her was breathtaking; Shirley felt as if she’d been transported to a Hollywood movie set.

A movie with explicit sex, anyway. Because things were about to get down and dirty.

They entered a room with a massive four-poster bed, the kind that required a step to climb into it. Randall set her down carefully on its high surface, and the bed’s billowy down comforters and pillow-top mattress threatened to swallow her whole. She sank down into the luxurious satin and velvet bedclothes, and before she could take a breath, Randall managed to sweep off her Nurse Mates and her scrubs, so she was clad only in her bra and panties. Waves of heat rose up her body, bringing a deep red flush to her skin, which was soon coated all over with a light, musky dew. The feel of the expensive satin sheets against her flushed, sweaty skin was pure sensuality, like velvet left out in the rain. The crotch of her panties was already soaked through, her nipples hard and sharp as cut glass. Her body ached to be separated from those little slips of nylon, cotton and lace.

Randall read her mind. He slipped one finger underneath the elastic waistband of her sopping-wet panties and tugged hard, ripping the thin nylon fabric in two and wrenching it from her body. He reached around behind her back and expertly unfastened her bra with one flick of his wrist. All at once she lay naked before his still fully clothed body, naked and breathless and exposed.

He plunged one finger into her depths, then two, then three. “My God, Shirley. You’re so wet. And you smell so good, so sweet. I want to taste you.”

She gave her consent by spreading her legs wide.

Randall’s sandy head dropped to Shirley’s dripping satin petals and began to feast. His tongue probed deep inside her first, licking her salty, musky juices, tasting the slick, ribbed walls of her sheath. Then it transferred to her hard, hot little nub, sending bursts of scorching sensation up and out to all corners of her body. She bucked underneath him, mewling and moaning as the first of what would be many orgasms took hold of her body. He fed upon her sweet juices for what seemed like hours, making her come again and again and again, until her whole body was on fire, sweaty and spent and pulsating.

The old stories were true—doctors really do know how to fuck better than anyone. All those years studying anatomy are bound to pay off, after all. And boy howdy, now Shirley was reaping the benefits.

Just when she thought she couldn’t possibly take any more, Randall took things up a notch. He started unbuttoning his shirt with one hand, and slipped four fingers from the other deep inside her cunt. He found her G-spot in less than an instant, and began pressing, pressing, pressing hard up against it in a slow, steady rhythm. He broke their connection just long enough to get out of his clothes, but to Shirley, even that brief respite was pure agony.

That agony didn’t last long, however. Shirley heard the familiar crinkly sound of a foil condom wrapper being torn, felt Randall’s firm, hard chest pressing down on top of her a moment later. “Can I come inside?” he whispered, teasing her cunt with the tip of his bulging cock.

She managed a small nod, and he plunged in. He was huge—the biggest, longest, thickest cock she’d ever taken into herself, and given all her randy activities of late, that was saying something. He plowed into her so hard and stretched her so wide that she thought she might split in two. He slipped his hands underneath her buttocks and pushed her up to meet him at each and every thrust, turning her body to such an angle that he hit her G-spot square in the middle on the way in, rubbed her clit with his shaft on the way out. It was simple, bread-and-butter fucking, but it was oh, sooooo good.

The best Shirley ever had, in fact.

She opened her eyes and stared up at Randall, watching him as he fucked her. The mound of hair that rested over his cock was sandy brown, just like on his head, and it was damp and glistening with her juices. She watched his thick, hard, purplish-red cock slide in and out of her, in and out, in and out. It was shiny and moist from their fucking; it reflected the bright afternoon sunlight on its surface, making it appear a shiny, well-formed weapon. Her cunt was like a wet, dewy rose, his cock its thick, knobby stem. Together they formed a beautiful garden, filled with heady scents and natural sounds.

Randall’s eyelids drooped half-closed, his mouth hung half-open in an expression of pure sex as he rammed into her again and again and again. The musky, salty-sweet smell of their sex permeated the room, mixed with the clean-linen odor of the lavender-scented bedclothes and the wafting perfume of the freesias, lilies, and magnolias growing in the gardens growing outside the bedroom window. Their fucking filled the room, made it bigger somehow. The ever-narrower space between them was hotter, thicker, steamier than any Southern midsummer afternoon. There was no need for any fancy sex toys or scented lubes of exotic fisting—the simple motions of their bodies and the animal noises they made with each thrust were already more erotic than anything Shirley had ever experienced.

And even so, Randall was about to intensify things even further. He leaned forward, changing the angle of penetration so that the tip of his cock hit her womb, shaking her whole body to the core. As he did so he moved in to kiss her, teasing her mouth with his tongue, sucking her entire lower lip into his mouth. He darted his tongue in and out of her mouth in perfect synchrony with his thrusts, then he moved lower to suck her neck, leaving a trail of deep purple love-bites in his wake. He worked his way further down, leaving more love-bites on her shoulders and in the valley between her breasts, until he found his way to her left nipple and began to suck it hard, taking the whole areola into his mouth, along with some of the surrounding flesh. The resulting suction was hard, intense. Shirley knew she’d be black and blue all over by the time he was done with her, but she didn’t care. She’d wear all those love bites like a badge of honor.

He transferred his attentions to her right breast—sucking it just as hard and deep as the other one, so she’d have a matching set of hickeys—all the while not letting up one iota on the fuckfest happening down south. The sound of their slapping bodies and mingling juices was deliciously obscene. Shirley listened to the noises of sex as they filled the room, and longed to say something—something dirty. She didn’t know much about dirty talk in the bedroom, but she figured there was always a first time.

“Fuck me, Randall, you dirty boy,” she grunted. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me hard.”

He obliged, stepping up the pace of his thrusts. The force of each impact was so strong, so earth-shattering, that Shirley thought her whole body would just dissolve. “Do you want me to fuck you, Shirley?” he yelled at her. “Do you? Do you?”

“I want you to fuck me,” she cried. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.”

“Do you want it harder? Do you want it faster?”

“Yes! Harder! Faster!”

He gave it to her so hard and so fast she thought her cunt would explode. And an instant later, it did—it exploded into a thousand spasms that throttled her body from the tip of her crown to the surface of her curling toes. Her pussy lips expanded and contracted, expanded and contracted, her juices gushed out of her in a raging salty river. “Look down,” he commanded her. “Look down and see what we’re doing to each other.”

She obeyed, and was stunned at just how otherworldly her cunt and his cock had become. Her pussy was more swollen and slick than it had ever been, her labia swelled to almost three times their normal size and spread out wide, exposing her deepest recesses to the air. His now dark-purple cock slid in and out of her distended lips, the condom so slick with her juices it was almost transparent. The blue veins on his shaft stood out at attention, rippling up and down his equipment and increasing her internal sensations better than no studded plastic sex toy ever could. The display of raw, pure sex between their bodies was the most erotic sight in the history of their shared world. And it was enough to send them both over the edge.

Randall grunted as he exploded into her, and Shirley immediately joined him in by far the most spectacular of her many orgasms. They rode the tidal wave of ecstasy together until it crashed hard against the beach of their bodies, ebbing and flowing until the last sensual vibrations disappeared. They collapsed into each other, enveloped in satisfaction, and the afterglow overtook them like a velvet glove.

They dozed there in the huge bed, their bodies wrapped and folded into one another, for several hours. They slept the deep, dark, dreamless sleep of spent lovers.

The shrill sound of police sirens jerked Shirley awake. She glanced at the open bedroom window, saw from the steep angle of the sunlight and the long shadows on the floor that it was now early evening. The sirens were still far away, but Shirley had a strange, sinking feeling that the cops were headed straight for them.

She grabbed Randall’s shoulder and shook it, hard. “Randall, wake up. Wake up!”

He opened one eye, keeping most of his face buried in the pillow. “Mrrgh?”

“Wake
up
! I think the police are on the way here.”

“Mrrrgh.” He pulled the pillow over his head. “No they’re not.”

The sirens grew louder and louder, until they were almost deafening. Red and blue lights spun on the bedroom walls. “Yes, they are! They’re here now! They’re here for
us!
Randall, get dressed!”

Shirley leapt out of bed, reaching frantically for her clothes. She jumped around like a gazelle, slipping into her own clothes while she gathered Randall’s up in her free arm and tossed them onto his head. “Get
up
Randall! Otherwise you might be dragged off to jail naked.”

Randall finally took her at her word and pulled himself out of bed. He tugged on his boxers and peeked through the curtains just as the whole house shook. “Oh shit,” he said. “They’ve got a police ram. I better go down and meet them, otherwise they’re going to break down the door. I can’t afford to replace my front entrance right now. Double-mahogany Georgian replica doors don’t come cheap.”

Shirley eyed his half-naked body. “At least put a shirt on. As much as I like seeing you this way, I’m sure the jailhouse isn’t the place to show off your chest.”

“Agreed.” He tossed on his shirt and headed out the door, buttoning it as he went. “You better meet me downstairs as soon as you’re decent,” he called after her.

Shirley got her clothes and shoes on, then checked her reflection in the mirror. She might be back in the attire of a workaday hospital nurse, but her face and hair were that of a steamy sexpot. Her hair was a disheveled, sexy tumble; her lips were swollen from kissing and her neck was dotted with at least three hickeys. Not exactly the wholesome girl-next-door look.

Oh well. There wasn’t anything she could do about it now. And from the sound of things downstairs, the cops were about to break down Randall’s gorgeous antique-reproduction front entrance.

By the time Shirley made it to the bottom of the massive winding staircase, Randall had managed to avert disaster by unlocking the door and ushering the police inside with all the charm of an English nobleman. “Breaking down the door won’t be necessary, gentlemen. I would have been outside to greet you, but I’m afraid you disturbed my afternoon siesta. I believe you are all here to arrest me? If so, please get on with it. I hate long waits.”

The police, who were in full riot gear, seemed very confused. Clearly, they’d been expecting more of a fight. “Actually, uhhh, Dr. Hamm, uhhh, you’re not under arrest. At least, not yet. We’re just here to execute a search warrant.”

Randall frowned. “Is that all? Then why all the pomp and circumstance?”

The top-ranking police officer removed his bulletproof helmet and scratched his head. “Uhhh, we received a tip that you’d put up a real fight,” he said.

Randall laughed. “You might want to take a better look at your informants, then. Officers, I have nothing to hide. Take a look around, search whatever you want. Just please don’t break anything.”

The police still just stood around looking confused. They didn’t seem to notice Shirley at first, but she decided to take the initiative and introduce herself. “Hi, I’m Shirley Daniels. Excuse me, umm, officers, but is there anything you needed from me?”