Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy

by Hughes, Jill Elaine

  And she was. Joanna jumped into the back of the car, giddy as a teenager on prom night. An unseen force had taken over her body, propelling her head-on into the wild world of roadside sex. Her nurse’s top and scrub bottoms were off before her behind could meet the worn upholstery of the Honda’s backseat. Her bra was next. She flung it across the car, it landed on the rearview mirror. She saved the panties for last. They ended up impaled on the gearshift, an obvious metaphor for what was about to happen.

  There she was, naked in the pitch blackness. A passing car’s headlights illuminated her full, round, white breasts, the beams highlighting her erect red nipples. Harlan’s breathing got labored as he took in the beautiful sight.

  Joanna reached out through the darkness until her hand landed on Harlan’s bulging cock. His pants were unbuttoned, but still on, his cock pointing skyward, all condomed-up and ready to go. The nuclear warhead was back in his pocket, just waiting to launch and explode. All she had to do was push the button.

  And push the button she did.

  The same unseen force that had stripped Joanna naked on the side of a public highway managed to get Harlan naked in a hurry, too. His shoes and socks ended up on the rear dashboard, his pants on the floor draped over the drive-train hump. His shirt he unbuttoned but kept on, something that Joanna found wildly sexy. She traced the outline of his pecs with one finger on her right hand, and used her left to adjust his equipment to the exact angle she wanted. He leaned forward to kiss her, but Joanna had other plans. Before he could say boo, Joanna was impaled on him.

  She rode him like a rodeo bull, bouncing and flailing, hanging on for dear life while he rocked and rolled her, meeting every one of her wild cowgirl moves with one of his own. They continued on this way, bucking, bumping and grinding on the Honda’s backseat like a couple of hormone-crazed high-school kids. They fucked this way, both sitting upright and crammed between the front seat and the rear door, the heat from their bodies steaming up the windows and heating up the inside of the car until it became a sauna. The car filled with the musky perfume of their wild fucking, taking on an erotic life of its own. The air became electrically charged, pressing its sharp particles against their naked, sweating, straining bodies. And just when Joanna could see her orgasm approaching over the horizon, Harlan decided to raise the stakes.

  He reached behind him and unlatched the car’s passenger door. Without breaking their connection, Harlan backed out of the car until he was standing just outside it on the gravel shoulder. He spun Joanna like a top on his cock, until she was facedown against the car seat, her legs scissored around his waist. He raised one knee to balance her body upon while he fucked her from behind, so he’d only have to grip her body with one hand. With the other, he went to work on her clit while he rammed into her with such force that Joanna thought her insides would burst.

  Harlan rubbed her clit in tiny, high-pressure circles that were perfectly timed with each thrust. “Come, baby,” he whispered. “Come for me now. You know you want it—“

  “Harder—“ Joanna heard herself groan. Her voice sounded far away and somehow not her own. She wanted to come, but she still had a ways to go. “Faster. Please—“

  “You know it, baby,” Harlan grunted. He picked up the pace, fucking her faster, harder and deeper than Joanna knew was humanly possible. She could feel the ramrod of his huge cock as it passed through the entrance of her sex over and over again at mach speed, making the walls of her vagina sting and her cervix throb in a heady mix of pleasure and pain. He was stretching her out, breaking her in, making her ready for the biggest bang of all.

  Harlan pressed Joanna’s clit hard against her pubic bone, then rammed her hard one final, mind-blowing time. Her orgasm throttled her from head to toe—a series of explosive vibrations that started with her clit and radiated deeper, first up and down the shaft of her vagina and then up and out through her belly, legs, and chest. She balled her fists and pounded the car seat as she came. “Unnnuhhhhhhggghhhh,” she groaned into the upholstery, biting down on one of her fists to keep from screaming. At the orgasm’s height of intensity, she saw stars, then briefly lost consciousness.

  Wow.

  And Harlan showed no signs of stopping.

  Harlan gradually shifted position until he was down on his knees. Now he was coming at Joanna from a completely different angle, and bringing on a brand-new set of sensations as a result. Now Joanna didn’t feel the thrusts as deeply as before, but they were still just as intense. Instead of ramming hard against her clit, Harlan rotated his cock slowly around and around the walls of her vagina, while thrusting downward in a manner that put delightful pressure on her clit and G-spot. He carefully measured his thrusts to maximize Joanna’s pleasure. Her vagina clenched tighter and tighter around his cock until finally the floodgates burst, sending her cunt into orgasmic spasms so insane that she thought she would split in two.

  This fuck session was the wildest one yet. Joanna had never known her body was capable of the sensations she’d just experienced.

  Harlan finally exploded into her when she thought she couldn’t take another second of the mind-numbing pleasure. He collapsed onto her back and sighed. “That was fantastic, Joanna.” He whispered. “You are one hell of a hot lay.”

  She felt herself blush. “Nobody’s every called me a hot lay before.”

  He pulled out and sat up beside her, patted her gently on the buttocks. “I find that very hard to believe.”

  Joanna sat up and folded her arms across her bare breasts, suddenly shy. “I actually never had much of a sex life before now,” she admitted, feeling her cheeks go even redder.

  Harlan reached over to stroke her cheek. “Well, that’s a travesty,” he said. After a long moment, he said “You haven’t told me much about yourself, Joanna.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” she replied, nervously chewing on a hangnail.

  “Tell it anyway.” Harlan stroked her cheek again before returning his bandaged right hand to his lap.

  “Well, I’m divorced,” Joanna said, uneasy about revealing too much about herself too soon. There was so much about her marriage to Bob that was still painful to her. “My parents are both dead, and I was an only child, so I don’t have any close relatives living. I grew up in Statesville and went to the University of North Carolina for nursing school. I’ve lived in North Carolina for almost all my life, except for the three years I spent as an Army nurse.”

  “You mentioned you had spent some time in the military,” Harlan said. “That’s interesting. Very interesting.” Even in the dim moonlight, Joanna could see that Harlan was smirking again.

  “Why?”

  Harlan wrapped his arm around Joanna’s bare shoulders and pulled her tenderly against his body. “You just don’t seem like the Army type, is all.”

  “That’s because I’m not,” Joanna replied. “The only reason I joined the Army was to help pay off my school loans. And to travel.”

  “I see.” Harlan cleared his throat. “So, I take it the only traveling you’ve done was during your time in the Army?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said, her voice clipped. “Except for my honeymoon in Las Vegas, but that was only for three days.”

  “Why haven’t you traveled more on your own, Joanna?” Harlan asked. “You seem to be someone who would enjoy it, especially given how much you seem to know about food and wine.”

  This touched a raw nerve with Joanna. She hadn’t grown up in a life of privilege or extravagance, as she suspected Harlan probably had. Although they had raised her with the ladylike manners and traditional values of a Southern belle, Joanna’s parents were poor North Carolina mill workers who had died young and left her no inheritance but their many unpaid debts. College had been a luxury she’d scrimped, saved, and served three hardship-filled years in the Army to pay for. Her ex-husband Bob had had a good income, but he’d also been a spendthrift during their marriage, leaving her worse off financially after her marriage than before. And Joanna hardl
y considered herself cultured—what little she knew about foreign cuisines and wines she’d learned from library books.

  “This may be news to you, Harlan, but there are people in this world who can’t just pick up and go to the other side of the world at the drop of a hat,” Joanna replied, curtly. “I’ve never had much money. I’ve always had to work for a living.”

  Harlan did not say anything for several minutes. He pulled away from her and leaned against the car door. Joanna glanced over at him and saw the familiar pattern of nervous tics rippling along his jaw.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Harlan finally responded. “Joanna, I assume that remark is supposed to imply that I am some kind of spoiled brat from a rich and powerful family, that I’ve just had everything handed to me on a silver platter or something. I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Joanna, you and I have pretty similar backgrounds.”

  “I have a hard time believing that,” Joanna chirped, although she had found the fact that Harlan had a middle-aged cousin who spoke and acted just like a native North Carolinian a bit odd.

  “Well, it’s true.” Harlan hunched up his neck and shoulders, obviously tense. “I might be a wealthy and successful surgeon now—and maybe not for long if my hand doesn’t heal properly—but I wasn’t always wealthy, or successful. Not by a long shot.”

  “Hmm,” was the only response Joanna could manage.

  “My parents died in a car accident when I was still a freshman in college. My father was a university professor at the small private college that I was attending just outside of Boston, so I got free tuition my first year. But after that I was on my own. My mother was a housewife, and my dad’s college-professor salary was never good. He was from a pretty poor family himself—in fact, he was originally from Asheville, North Carolina, just a few hours away from here. I still have relatives in North Carolina. Like my cousin Richard, who you just met.”

  “Hmm,” Joanna grunted again. She was fast growing embarrassed at the way she’d prejudged Harlan as being just another wealthy, arrogant Yankee—when in fact he was only a generation removed from the same kind of rural mountain upbringing as her own.

  Harlan seemed to notice her embarrassment. His tone of voice softened a bit. “Like I said, my family wasn’t well off. They died when I was only nineteen, and my brothers and sisters were all still just kids. Mom and Dad didn’t leave us much in the will, and what they did leave got divided up among four siblings. So I pretty much had to work my way through college, and then medical school and residency at UMass, getting by mostly on loans—which were gargantuan by the time I finally finished my residency training. So I, like you, joined the Army to help pay them off. I was an Army surgeon for eight years. I served in Desert Storm too, just like you did. I was mostly stationed in Turkey, but I did spend some time at Walter Reed in the early 90s. I’m surprised the two of us never ran into each other there. Maybe we were there at different times and just missed each other.”

  Joanna was stunned. Harlan’s life story was sounding more and more like her own. Flushing red, all she could do was look down at the dirty floorboards of her car.

  “I got out of the Army just after Desert Storm,” Harlan went on. “I’d had the opportunity to get some important research articles on surgical infections and other topics published as a direct result of my Army work, and that led me to get several lucrative faculty offers from research hospitals. I finally settled on Hofts. After I’d been at Hofts for a couple of years, one of my colleagues urged me to accompany her on a trip to Africa with Doctors Without Borders to help treat victims of Sudan’s civil war. I jumped at the offer. I took an unpaid sabbatical from Hofts and went to the Sudan for eight months.”

  “What was that like?” Joanna asked, genuinely curious. She’d always dreamed of volunteering her nursing skills overseas, but she’d never been able to afford to take the time off from her regular job.

  Harlan sighed audibly. “Well, at first it was absolutely terrible. The things I saw there—horrible, unbelievable things—they just defy description.”

  Harlan said nothing more for several minutes. Joanna didn’t press him; she could tell that every word in his Sudan story came with great difficulty. She leaned back in her seat, waiting for Harlan to tell the rest of his tale in his own time.

  After several minutes, Harlan pulled Joanna closer and began to stroke her hair. “It took me a month or two to adjust to that horrific environment. There are literally stretches of days and weeks during my first few months in the Sudan that I have completely blacked out. But once I was there a while, I found that the medicine I was practicing among the refugees and tribesmen was doing a lot of good. I saw with my own eyes that even in the midst of all that wretchedness and human misery, one person—one surgeon—could do a hell of a lot of good. And I was fortunate to be working with a lot of very, very good people, who collectively did a huge amount of good. Joanna, my time in Doctors Without Borders was the first thing I ever experienced that made me completely proud of the fact that I am a physician.”

  This surprised Joanna. “You mean you weren’t proud of that before?”

  Harlan sighed again. “Joanna, to be quite honest, I originally became a doctor principally to make money. I didn’t exactly grow up poor, but in a family with four kids living on a college professor’s salary we weren’t exactly well-to-do, either. Then when my parents died and I was on my own—I knew that in order to continue my education, I would have to take out loans—and then I would have to find some kind of job that would allow me to pay the loans back and still have enough money left over to live some kind of comfortable life. The Army helped with some of the bills, but not all of them. I saw medicine as a means to make a comfortable living, and I also found that I was good at it. Sure, I took the Hippocratic Oath, swore to “do no harm” and all that, but until I went to the Sudan, I was in the profession for the money, not necessarily to help serve humanity.”

  “If that’s really how you felt, then why did you go to the Sudan in the first place? You could have made more money by staying home.”

  Harlan laughed. “Well, that’s kind of a funny story.”

  “So tell it.”

  “The colleague who urged me to go with her to the Sudan was the woman who eventually became my wife. I agreed to go because I had a crush on her. I figured that spending time with her in a remote, dangerous place would help me seduce her more easily. And that’s exactly what happened.”

  Joanna’s eyes flew wide. Still, given what had just transpired between to two of them, she wasn’t exactly surprised. “You went all the way to the Sudan just so you could have sex with a woman?”

  “Precisely.”

  “So, where is this woman now?” Joanna asked. She’d noticed days ago that Harlan wore no wedding ring.

  Harlan stiffened. “She’s dead.”

  “I see,” Joanna said in a small voice. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But—“

  Harlan pulled away. “I already said I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joanna said in a small voice.

  Harlan did not answer. Instead he gathered up his clothes from the car’s floorboards and got dressed. “We should probably get going,” he said. “We don’t want to risk getting picked up half-naked by the highway patrol.”

  Suddenly, Joanna understood the deep look of pain she’d detected in Harlan’s eyes from their first meeting. She understood now why a part of him always deemed dangerous just below the surface—even why he’d earned the nickname “Darth Vader” among the Covington Hospital nurses. He’d lost the woman he loved—probably violently. Joanna guessed that his wife must have died on one of their Doctors Without Borders trips, perhaps in the Sudan, perhaps somewhere else.

  But where? And how?

  As she got dressed, a hundred possible scenarios ran through Joanna’s mind. Had Harlan’s wife died in a war�
��s crossfire, or perhaps from stepping on a land mine? Had she died of a horrible tropical disease? Kidnapped by bandits? Or worse? Joanna shuddered. She couldn’t think of anything worse than having someone you love die young and violently in a foreign land. But it had to be true. There was no other explanation for Harlan’s dark side—not as far as she could tell, anyway.

  Joanna decided not to broach the subject with him again. She would show him patience, kindness, and understanding—not to mention physical passion. And then, once he trusted her completely, perhaps Harlan could share his demons with her, maybe even come to terms with them.

  FIFTEEN

  After another hour or so of highway driving, Joanna and Harlan were approaching the outskirts of Statesville. They’d be home in a few minutes, and Joanna’s crotch buzzed at the prospect of persuading Harlan to join her in her queen-sized bed. After their conversation turned sour following their roadside tryst, Joanna wasn’t sure she’d get the privilege of bedding Harlan again anytime soon. But she could still test the waters. She gently placed her hand on Harlan’s knee as he drove. He didn’t look down or acknowledge her gesture in any way, but he didn’t rebuff her, either. A good sign.

  As Harlan pulled the car off the freeway and onto the Statesville exit ramp the anticipation building in her nether parts as she counted down the landmarks between the freeway and her home was too much for her to bear. She needed a quick fix, and she couldn’t wait even the five minutes it would take to drive home and get inside her condo.

  “Harlan, pull over please.”

  He glanced at her sideways. “But we’re almost to your house.”

  “Pull over.”

  Harlan looked for a suitable spot, and selected the empty parking lot of a donut shop that had closed for the evening. The donut shop was only two blocks from her condo, but Joanna’s need for some more sensual satisfaction was too urgent even to wait that long. Harlan parked the car and switched off the engine. “Now Joanna, I really think it won’t hurt if we wait just a few minutes more—“