Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (36 page)

Shirley carried the last box into her new apartment. Thanks to a generous raise at the hospital along with a cash reward from the state Crime Fighters fund for helping the police solve Enola Higginbottom’s murder, she could now afford a bigger apartment in a nicer part of town. And a car. And real furniture. Things were definitely looking up for her, and in more ways than one.

She set the heavy box down in her front entryway and picked her way across the living room, which was strewn with boxes and bags. Randall knelt in the middle of the room, muttering to himself while he tried to assemble her new entertainment center. “The damn instructions to this thing are in Chinese,” he growled. “So don’t expect me to be done anytime soon.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she said, gently squeezing his shoulder. “You’re a pretty smart guy, after all. And I know you love messing with hardware.”

“Whatever,” Randall grumbled and went back to tinkering with the pile of wood and screws that would eventually hold her new television. It certainly wasn’t the most romantic thing for a man to say, but that was just fine with Shirley. Dr. Randall Hamm might be a man of few words, but he had it where it counted. And any man who would spend his entire Saturday putting together furniture for her was a man worth keeping around.

Shirley took a can of grape soda, a favorite since her childhood, from her otherwise empty fridge and went out onto her balcony to enjoy it. She glanced back over her shoulder at Randall, who was now hammering two boards together, still muttering to himself around a mouthful of wood screws. She smiled as her body warmed all over. Even this most mundane of tasks was sexy and masculine when he did it.

She turned away from him to stare out over the grassy mountain meadow that bordered the back of her apartment complex. For the first time that she could remember, Shirley Daniels was perfectly content with her life. Everything was just as it should be.

Her relationship with Dr. Randall Hamm might last forever, or it might end tomorrow. And she was perfectly happy with that. Neither of them had discussed what would happen in the future. Neither of them knew what tomorrow or the next day would bring. But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that it was a beautiful day in Raleigh, North Carolina. And they were spending it together.

Prescription for Passion

one

It was summertime in Statesville, North Carolina. Everything was green, blooming, and beautiful—from the mountain rhododendrons, to the dogwood and honeysuckle trees, to the valleys and hillsides covered in wildflowers. The mountain air was heady with pollen and dew, the skies were bright, the weather glorious.

There is nothing more beautiful than an Appalachian summer, a Blue Ridge Mountains summer in particular. You couldn’t ask for anything more perfect. So by all accounts, life for anyone living in Statesville, North Carolina in summertime should be perfect, too. Only it wasn’t.

Harlan and Joanna Wilkinson were newlyweds. They’d married in the spring after a whirlwind courtship. Even though their relationship was only a few months old, they’d already seen more than their share of ups and downs. They had sex for the first time within literally minutes of meeting in an elevator. They had their first argument soon after. Joanna’s ex-husband dragged them both into a ludicrous court battle and scam that landed him in jail and almost tore their budding relationship apart.

Harlan and Joanna survived it all. They even got married in the same courthouse where Joanna’s ex-husband Bob tried to destroy them. It was a true storybook romance, filled with passion, intrigue—and plenty of hot sex.

So like any true storybook romance, it was all happily ever after, right?

Well, not quite.

****

“Where’s my breakfast?” Harlan shouted. “I need to be in the OR in fifteen minutes and I can’t get through a five-hour operation on an empty stomach!”

Joanna was lying facedown on her bed, half-asleep and still wearing her nursing scrubs. She’d just come off the night shift at Covington Community Hospital twenty minutes ago. And yet her infernal husband somehow expected her to serve him an eight-course meal at six in the morning? What planet was he living on? “There’s cereal in the cupboard,” she murmured into her pillow. Then she pulled the covers over her head and tried to go to sleep.

That didn’t satisfy Harlan at all. In less than ten seconds he was pounding on their bedroom door. “Joanna, I need something to eat. Where the hell is my breakfast? You know I can’t cook worth a damn. Help me out here, please.”

Joanna groaned and dragged herself upright. “You know, Harlan, you cooked me some very nice breakfasts when we were dating. Did you suddenly forget how to cook when I slipped that wedding ring on your finger?”

He rolled his eyes. “Joanna, you know I’m no good around the house when I’m working double shifts in the OR.”

“I’m working double shifts right too, you know. At
night.
I’m supposed to be sleeping right now.”

Harlan sighed. “That’s different.”

“Really? How so?”

“You’re a nurse. I’m a surgeon.”

“And?”

“And I think the answer to that question should be obvious. My job is
much
harder than yours.”

Joanna slapped a palm to her forehead. “Oh, no, you don’t, Harlan. I am
not
having this argument with you right now. I’ve had a grand total of three hours’ sleep in the past three days.”

“Yeah, well I haven’t slept at all in
four
days, and I’m about to perform complex surgery on three different people today. So don’t you dare complain to me about being tired.”

Now it was Joanna’s turn to roll her eyes. “Oh right, I forgot. You macho surgeons think sleep deprivation is a badge of honor. Well, I don’t. I still remember enough of my nursing-school education to know that sleep deprivation is bad for you. ”

“Joanna—“

“Don’t
Joanna
me. Pour yourself a bowl of cereal and leave me the hell alone!”

“Fine,” Harlan snapped. He slammed the bedroom door shut. Joanna heard him stomp out of the house and lock the front door. She supposed that meant he’d be driving through McDonald’s for breakfast again. He’d been doing that every day for the past month and had already packed on almost ten pounds. Meanwhile, Joanna wasn’t eating much at all, to the point her skin was mottled and her eyes were sunken. The stress they were both under was enough to drive anyone to the edge. Harlan and Joanna both looked terrible, and felt worse. And they were taking it out on each other.

Working opposite sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital six and seven days a week were taking their toll on both of them. They hadn’t made love in weeks. They couldn’t. They were never in the house together for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and they always spent that fifteen minutes arguing.

Things couldn’t go on like this for much longer.

There was trouble in paradise, that was for damn sure.

****

Billy Hartzell was new in town. A big-city boy from Atlanta, he’d decided to take a chance on a six-week contract nursing job at a small-town hospital he’d booked through the job placement office back at the University of Georgia Nursing School. He’d been only one of five male nursing students in his class, but despite the nationwide nursing shortage, he’d had trouble finding a job.

Nobody came right out and said so, but Billy knew that the reason he’d had no permanent job offers at all when the female nursing students were fielding ten and twenty offers apiece was because of reverse discrimination. It might be the twenty-first century, and nursing might be more open to men these days, but this was still the South. In the South, people tended to do things the old-fashioned way. And a male nurse—let alone a male nurse who looked like just he walked off the set of a Hollywood movie—was anything but old-fashioned. In the South, nurses were supposed to be portly, and middle-aged, and
female.
Not a hot twenty-two-year-old version of Brad Pitt.

So it went without saying that Billy had plenty of trouble finding a job. After weeks and months of fruitless searching, the job placement officer at nursing school took pity on him and told him about “contract nurses”—nurses who travel across the country working six-week-long contract jobs. Contract nurses filled temporary holes in hospitals’ nursing schedules, taking on extra work or filling in for nurses who were on sick or maternity leave. The take-home pay was very high, though there were no fringe benefits and no opportunity to put down roots or have any kind of stable life. The job placement officer told him she didn’t usually recommend contract work to her nursing school graduates, but she thought it might be the only way for a male nurse like him to get a nursing job in the South, at least for the time being. And maybe at some point, a contract nursing job could lead to something permanent—especially if he was willing to travel to another part of the country.

Billy wasn’t too keen on the prospect of moving every six weeks, but he needed a job. Plus, the opportunity to see different parts of the country appealed to him, even if the lack of stability didn’t. And what did he really need with stability right now, anyway? He was only twenty-two, he had no wife or steady girlfriend, no mortgage. All he owned was an old, battered pickup truck that was completely paid for, and a single suitcase of clothes. Billy figured he probably wouldn’t have too many opportunities to travel the country without being tied down. He might as well give it a try.

For his first assignment, Billy was hoping for something exciting and edgy, like an ER nurse position in a bustling Southern city like Memphis, New Orleans, or Nashville. Or maybe something out West—there were huge nursing shortages in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Male nurses were most in demand in the big cities, and that’s where the best jobs were, too. And getting cutting-edge experience at the big-city hospitals would only make him that much more marketable as a nurse. Or so the recruiting agent promised him when she signed him to a year-long travel contract.

But like so many things, it was all too good to be true. An exciting job in a big city just wasn’t in the cards for Billy. Given what he knew about the rural South and its prejudices against male nurses, Billy had never expected to find himself assigned to bedpan-and-IV duty at a community hospital in the tiny town of Statesville, North Carolina. He’d done bedpan-and-IV duty as a candystriper in high school, for Chrissakes. It wasn’t nursing work. It was grunge work.

The work might be boring, but he couldn’t argue with the pay. Thirty dollars an hour, plus free housing in the hospital dormitory. Not a bad deal for a six-week gig. There was even an option to extend beyond six weeks if he liked, but somehow Billy doubted he would.

Statesville was charming and quaint, and the mountain scenery was beautiful, especially in the summer -Billy would give the place that much. But exciting? Hardly. Fulfilling? Not really. Emptying soiled bedpans and checking IVs just wasn’t what he spent four years in nursing school to do, even if the pay was good.

And there was another reason Billy was apprehensive about staying in Statesville beyond the six-week minimum.

The other nurses.

Ever since his first day on the job, Billy was uneasy around the other nurses. And they seemed just as uneasy around him. They ogled him, whispered about him, and generally treated him like a carnival curiosity. At one level, Billy supposed it was because nobody in Statesville had ever seen a male nurse before. But there was another dimension to it, too.

Every nurse at Covington Community Hospital—from the youngest nurse’s aide all the up to crotchety old Maryam Malone, the head nurse administrator for the whole hospital—had the hots for Billy Hartzell.

“Oh boy, look what the cat dragged in,” gushed Maryam Malone the first time she’d laid eyes on Billy. “You sure don’t see ‘em like that every day.”

“No, you sure don’t,” oozed Starla Berring, Covington Community Hospital’s newest addition to the surgical nursing staff. “Yummy.”

“You say that as if he’s good enough to eat,” Maryam said, tucking a pen behind her ear.

“He is. Mmmmmm.” Starla leaned against the wall, admiring the view as Billy bent over to pick up a stack of bedpans. “I’d love to take him home and spread some chocolate sauce all over that gorgeous body of his.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, Starla,” Maryam scolded. “We have a sexual-harassment policy around here, ya know.” But the old woman was leering at him herself. “Not that I don’t agree with ya, hon. But, alas, my carefree single days are long behind me.”

“
Very
long behind you,” Starla said, batting her boss playfully on the shoulder. “You’re older than my grandmother, Maryam.”

“No more comments about my age, girl,” Maryam retorted just as playfully. “Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Never you mind, hon. Now stop drooling over that boy and get down to the scrub trough. You’ve got a routine gallbladder to assist on. And you’ll need to be on your toes, too, because Darth Vader is in charge of that operation.”

Starla’s face fell. “Darth Vader? I’m stuck with Darth Vader again? Sheesh, Maryam, you promised me a break from that jerk.”

“I know I did hon, but we’re short on surgeons right now, so good old Darth Vader—I mean, Dr. Wilkinson—is pulling double duty. He just picked up another shift after working eighteen hours straight. Which doesn’t exactly make him pleasant to be around, let me tell you.” The older nurse shook her head and clucked. “I swear, I thought marrying Joanna would mellow that man out a little, but lately it seems married life isn’t agreeing with him very much. Somehow I don’t think that marriage is gonna last ‘til Christmas.”

She narrowed her gaze at Starla. “You didn’t hear that from me, of course. And by the way, Starla, don’t let what I just told you give any homewrecking ideas. Joanna and Harlan are still married, even if they are at each others’ throats all the time.”

“Well, if that marriage breaks up, don’t blame me,” Starla quipped. “Dr. Harlan Wilkinson is just about the only hot thing in pants around here that
doesn’t
interest me. He might be cute, but he’s an asshole. Frankly, I don’t know what Joanna sees in him.”

“There’s no accounting for taste, hon,” was Maryam’s noncommittal reply. “You best get your fanny down to Scrub, Starla,” she said. “Darth Vader doesn’t like it when his nurses are late to the OR.”

Starla grudgingly shuffled down the hall towards the OR scrub suite, but not before stealing another glance at Billy Hartzell’s luscious backside. Boy howdy, what she wouldn’t give to see that backside minus its scrubs.

Billy Hartzell picked up the last of the clean bedpans for distribution on his shift and dropped them onto a waiting cart. He could feel Starla Berring’s eyes boring into him from across the room—that horny young thing’s gaze was like fire. He’d noticed Starla from the very beginning. After all, it was pretty damn hard not to notice Starla, with her statuesque body, her long blonde hair, her aquamarine eyes, her size doubleD breasts that always seemed seconds away from exploding through the thin fabric of her scrubs. Starla was plenty hot, all right. And plenty horny, too—for him.

Most guys his age would jump at the chance to get naked with a girl like Starla. But Billy had never been the type for casual sex. He’d only been with two women in his life—both of them serious girlfriends whom he had loved. His first intimate relationship with his high school sweetheart had been passionate at first, but had burned out just as quickly. His second one had lasted longer—three years—but it had ended badly. Billy had had plenty of chances to be with women since then, but he’d always found ways to avoid them. He’d been badly hurt, and just didn’t want to risk being hurt again. And he just wasn’t the one-night stand type. He never understood how men could do the whole love-‘em-and-leave-‘em routine time and time again, even when he watched his fraternity brothers do just that practically every weekend in college.