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

by Hughes, Jill Elaine

  Judge Diviston smiled. “Well now. That’s a horse of a different color.”

  Harlan crossed the courtroom to Joanna’s side and took both her hands in his. She saw that he’d had the stitches removed from the right one, which was now perfectly healed. “Your Honor, I assure you that my intentions towards Ms. Watson have always been honorable. I want to marry her, be the father of her children, work with her, live with her, and grow old with her. That is, if she’ll have me.” Harlan went down upon one knee, gazed up at Joanna, his eyes brimming with tears. “Joanna, I love you. Will you marry me? Here? Now? Please?”

  Joanna couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even breathe. Her thighs were jelly, her lower belly tomato soup. She wanted to say yes—needed to say yes—but for some reason she couldn’t get her mouth to form the word.

  Judge Diviston placed a firm hand on her shoulder. “Ma’am, I suggest you hang on to this here fellow. I’m willing to bet my law degree he’s the most lovestruck puppy in all of North Carolina.”

  The judge’s strong grasp was enough to unstick Joanna’s lips. “Y-yes, Harlan,” she stammered. “I’ll marry you. Right here, right now. No conditions. Just my love.”

  They embraced for a long time; then Harlan’s mouth seized upon hers, and they kissed with more wanton abandon than any courtroom should ever have witness to.

  THE END

  Sex in a Southern City

  ONE

  Some things just aren’t meant to be.

  So thought Shirley Daniels as she packed the last of her belongings into her rented U-Haul, rolled the cargo door shut, and prepared to leave behind her beloved hometown of Statesville, North Carolina forever.

  Shirley never thought she’d see the day that she’d leave the small rural town of her birth in favor of the big city. After all, she’d lived here all her life. She grew up here, even worked her entire career as a nurse-anesthetist at Statesville’s Covington Community Hospital. The only time she’d spent away from home was her time in nursing school, and she’d always come home on summer and winter vacations, even many weekends. But her life in Statesville was over now. And she had Bob Watson to thank for that.

  The bastard.

  Just a few short months ago, Shirley had made a deal with Bob Watson.

  Or to put things more accurately, she’d made a deal with the devil himself. And it had gone badly. Very badly.

  Shirley made the mistake of getting in the middle of Bob’s nasty divorce from her longtime coworker—and now—former friend—Joanna Watson-Wilkinson. Shirley hated to admit it now, but when Joanna became romantically involved with Covington Community Hospital’s dashing new chief surgeon Dr. Harlan Wilkinson when he’d arrived in town just a few months earlier, Shirley had become insanely jealous. She’d had a crush on Dr. Wilkinson for years, in fact—ever since she first saw a picture of him in Medical Volunteerism Quarterly —shirtless, tanned, and rugged on the back of Range Rover when he was on one of his Doctors Without Borders trips. When Dr. Wilkinson had shown interest in Joanna instead of her—well, call her petty, but Shirley had decided then and there that their friendship was over.

  It wasn’t much of a loss. Shirley’s so-called “friendship” with Joanna had never been that all that deep, anyway. Joanna had been three years ahead of Shirley back in school, so they’d barely known each other outside the majorette squad where Joanna had been a captain and Shirley only a junior twirler. They were cordial at work, but rarely socialized outside of work—not that Shirley had had much of a social life since high school, anyway. So when Bob Watson and his slimy lawyer approached Shirley one night when she was sipping a watery Appletini at the Dew Drop Inn—Statesville’s only bar—with a scheme on how she could make some easy money and get back at her romantic rival in the process, Shirley had been all ears.

  Bob Watson, it turned out, was quite the con artist. He’d even managed to rope Covington Community Hospital’s former chief administrator Joseph Middleton into the scam. The plan was for the three of them to show up at a court hearing regarding Joanna and Bob’s divorce decree and offer up a bunch of phony evidence that Covington Community Hospital was entitled to a share of Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s millions of dollars’ worth of patent royalties. The deal was, the three of them would testify against Harlan and Joanna in court, then split a sizable share of the patent royalties among themselves. According to Bob, there was more than enough cash to go around to fatten Covington Community Hospital’s coffers and make the three of them millionaires.

  Of course, Bob had failed to mention that he and his sleazy lawyer hadn’t exactly worked out the finer details. The judge saw right through their scam, threw the whole case out of court, and ordered that Bob, his lawyer, and the rest of them be prosecuted for grand larceny and conspiracy to commit interstate fraud. Bob and his attorney were both forced to plead guilty in order to avoid life sentences—both were now doing ten-year stretches in federal prison. Joseph Middleton had died of a heart attack two weeks before his trial began. And since Shirley had never actually gotten the chance to take the stand in court and commit perjury herself, she’d gotten off with a slap on the wrist—a five-thousand-dollar fine and thirty hours of community service, but only after hiring an expensive lawyer whose legal fees ate up her entire nest egg, and then some.

  And of course, she’d lost her job, too.

  Shortly after she got fired, Shirley’s ailing parents died within a week of each other at the nursing home where they’d both been living for years. An only child, she’d been born when her mother was pushing fifty and near-menopausal, and her parents had both lived well into their seventies. Her parents had died virtually penniless, all of their savings eaten up by years of nursing home bills. Shirley had to pay for their funerals herself.

  She was broke, humiliated, and all alone in the world.

  Shirley had given up the best years of her life caring for her aging, elderly parents—ever since she’d graduated nursing school, her entire existence had revolved around work and the nursing home, leaving almost no time for dating. She’d spent several years living like a nun—in every celibate sense of the word, in fact. It had hardened her, made her bitter inside. It was that hard, bitter edge that Bob Watson and his scummy scam had appealed to. But now, like her parents, that side of Shirley was dead, too.

  And good riddance.

  In a way, the double-whammy of losing her job and her parents in the same month was a blessing. It gave her freedom, a golden opportunity to start life anew.

  Shirley Daniels was in her mid-thirties now, and she decided that it was high time she began living the life of a single, sexually liberated woman. She’d dabbled a bit in the decadent side of life in the month or so leading up to the time she’d met Bob Watson, and had enjoyed every minute of it. She’d seduced a twenty-year-old fratboy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill one night on a whim, then had impromptu sex standing up in the hospital locker room with a nervous surgical resident just a few days later. Those two encounters had been her little way of making up for lost time, and they’d also made her aggressive, even a little bold. In her final impromptu, illicit tryst, she’d had sex in the hospital boiler room with a sexy young welder while she was technically still on the clock at work. All three encounters were hot, satisfying, even mind-blowing. But something had been missing.

  Namely, love.

  Or if not love, at least romance. Fucking a sexy stranger almost half her age up against a wall in a boiler room had its appeal, sure. But it didn’t last much beyond the final spasm of her orgasm. It scratched an itch—that was all. Shirley was a mature, sensual woman, not a giddy college girl. She didn’t just want to scratch an itch. She wanted—needed—more.

  Shirley thought she’d get what she wanted from Bob Watson. Boy, had she been wrong, and in more ways than one. Not only had his get-rich-quick scheme been a total disaster, sleeping with him was even worse. Bob might have been reasonably good-looking and only a year or two past forty, but
he was as impotent as a ninety-year-old paraplegic. They’d tried to have sex at least six different times, and every single time Bob had failed to get or maintain an erection. No amount of sucking, licking, or stroking on Shirley’s part had helped, either. And the guy couldn’t even work his way around a clit, either. The only action the two of them had seen at all had involved Shirley’s vibrator.

  No wonder Joanna had divorced him.

  When it came to comparing her life to Joanna Watson-Wilkinson’s, Shirley knew she came up with the short end of the stick. Joanna was now happily married to a multimillionaire chief hospital surgeon, lived in a huge mansion on the edge of town with twenty wooded acres, an indoor swimming pool, and thoroughbred stables, and had just gotten promoted to chief surgical nurse at the hospital to boot.

  On the other hand, Shirley had lost her job, her parents, her home, and had gotten stuck having dildo sex with Joanna’s impotent ex-husband.

  Talk about poetic justice.

  Shirley climbed into the cab of the U-Haul and keyed the ignition. She wasn’t going to think about all the bad things that had happened in Statesville any more. From now on, she would be looking forward, not back. She pulled the lumbering U-Haul out onto the main drag through town and headed for the interstate. She headed for her new life, her new beginning.

  From this day forward, Shirley Daniels was a new woman. And once she made it to Raleigh, things were going to change for her in a very big way. She was sure of it.

  If she only knew how.

  Two

  It was Shirley Daniels’ first day on the job at UNC-Raleigh University Hospital, and things were not going well.

  Back in Statesville, Shirley had not only been the best nurse-anesthetist on staff at Covington Community Hospital, she’d been the only nurse-anesthetist on staff at Covington Community Hospital. One by one, all her fellow nurse-anesthetists had quit in favor of better-paying jobs at urban hospitals, until her only competition for anesthesia jobs was a seventy-two-year old anesthesiologist who’d had his medical license suspended twice for falling asleep in the OR. Compared to him, the spry young Shirley was an anesthesia genius, even without “MD” after her name.

  Back in Statesville, Shirley was a big fish in a little pond. Here at this vast, well-funded major research hospital, it was just the opposite. Shirley was an ill-trained, naïve, countrified nurse without a clue about how things worked at a big-city teaching hospital.

  She’d made her first mistake within five minutes of arriving at her new job. Accustomed as she was to Covington Community Hospital’s collegial atmosphere between doctors and nurse practitioners, she’d first shown up to work at the hospital’s Anesthesiology department, as she always had back home in Statesville. But no sooner had she crossed the office threshold did four hulking male Anesthesiology MDs practically grab her by the collar and toss her out into the hallway. “This office is for doctors only, toots,” one of them had snarled at her. “The nurses’ lounge is in Building A, lower level.”

  “B-but—I’m a nurse practitioner,” Shirley protested. “I have a master’s degree and more than eight hundred hours of advanced anesthesia training on top of that—“

  “Get out!” the three doctors screamed at her in unison. And the door slammed in her face.

  Shirley was shocked and bewildered. She’d heard rumors back in nursing school about how some hotshot MD-level anesthesiologists weren’t fond of mere nurses homing in on their territory, but she’d never actually encountered outright prejudice. The lone MD anesthesiologist back in Statesville had frequently asked her for advice on how to configure the hospital’s new computerized dosing machine, since he’d never been trained on one when he’d been at medical school almost fifty years earlier. She was used to being treated as a colleague—even an equal—by most doctors she’d worked with over the years. But those three big-city MDs had cast her out of their sight as if she were a leper. And it only got worse from there.

  So much for big-city people supposedly being more open-minded and accepting than small-town folk. She might as well be in Siberia.

  This was the last time Shirley would ever accept a nursing job over the phone. She knew there was a nationwide nursing shortage, but this was ridiculous.

  After wandering the halls for almost half an hour and begging a senior citizen volunteer for help, Shirley finally made her way to the main nurses’ lounge in hopes of inquiring where the nurse-anesthetists’ department was housed—only to find that the rank-and-file shift nurses weren’t too fond of nurse-anesthetists, either.

  Shirley walked into the nurses’ lounge, carrying her duffel bag, anesthesia kit, and a slip of paper with her new boss’ name on it. The collected heads of the two dozen or so nurses relaxing in the lounge on their coffee breaks or between shifts all jerked up at once. To her surprise, Shirley noticed that several of the nurses were men. And even more to her surprise, not a single one of her fellow nurses—male or female—said or did anything in greeting, not even a simple nod of the head. In all her days as a gracious Southerner, Shirley had never seen such a blatant lack of manners.

  “Ahem.” She cleared her throat loudly, hoping for some kind of response. She got nothing.

  Well, when in Rome, Shirley thought. She might as well just be rude like everyone else. “Excuse me, but what the hell does a gal need to do to get some help around here?”

  “Don’t look at us,” one of the female nurses sneered at her. “We don’t help nurse practitioners.”

  Shirley was dumbfounded. “B-but how do you know I’m a nurse practitioner? I didn’t even get a chance to introduce myself.”

  “We know your kind on sight,” a portly male nurse snipped. “This lounge is for real nurses only. So I suggest you take a hike, little lady.”

  By this point, Shirley was near despair. Her shift was supposed to have started almost an hour ago, and she still had no idea what she was supposed to do or where she was supposed to go. At this rate, she’d get fired before she’d even had a chance to do any real work.

  So much for making a fresh start in Raleigh. Not even here a full day yet, and she was already a miserable failure.

  Just as she was about to burst into tears, an elderly nurse she hadn’t noticed before shuffled up from her spot in the corner. The older woman was white-haired and walked with a limp and a stooped back, but it was clear from her flinty gaze that when it came to nursing, she still meant business. “Don’t ya listen hide nor hair t’ what none o’ them youngsters say,” she said, a deep backwoods accent jarring Shirley’s genteel ears. “Back in my day, all nurses were practitioners. We just didn’t call ourselves that. I worked a MASH unit back in Vietnam, ya know. An’ us MASH nurses did everythin’ from give patients ether during surgery to sew up incisions to doin’ bedside psychiatry while the doctors were all out gettin’ drunk. An’ we didn’t git paid extra for it, neither.” She extended her gnarled, blue-veined hand. “Name’s Marla. Marla Crabtree. I been in the nursin’ business nigh on fifty years, an’ I don’t ‘spect to retire til I drop dead.”

  “A pleasure, ma’am,” Shirley stammered, still reeling. “If you don’t mind, I was wondering—“

  “Ask me any question ya want, little lady. Just don’t ask me how old I am.”

  Shirley chuckled. She liked Marla already. “Well, I’m supposed to be working as a nurse-anesthetist. I took the job over the phone via an outside recruiter, and nobody told me where I supposed to go on my first day. I’ve tried asking around, but—“

  Marla grinned. “Let me guess. The anesthesiologists knocked ya down on yer ass.”

  “In a matter of speaking, yes.”

  “Don’t take it personal, hon. Them gas dogs, they hate everybody.”

  Shirley frowned. “Gas dogs?”

  Marla laughed heartily. “That’s what us old-timers call you folks who work the gas in the OR. Back when I was in ‘Nam, some o’ the docs used to snort ether in the off hours whenever the booze ran low. That’s how they got their na
me, an’ it just stuck, I guess. No offense meant, ma’am.”

  Shirley smiled. “None taken.” She followed the gnomelike little woman as she waddled out of the nurses’ lounge and down the hall. Despite her age and apparent lack of mobility, Marla Crabtree moved quickly. Shirley practically had to run to keep up with her.

  “What’d ya say yer name was, little lady?” Marla asked as she darted down the hall, ducking this way and that to avoid rushing gurneys and running orderlies.

  “I didn’t,” Shirley replied, breathless. “It’s Shirley. Shirley Daniels.”

  “Right good name,” Marla said as she dashed into a waiting elevator. “Sturdy. I had me a cousin named Shirley back in Pennington Gap, the little nowhere mountain town that I’m from. Ya don’t meet too many Shirleys nowadays.”

  “My parents were old-fashioned,” Shirley said, leaning against the elevator wall as she tried to catch her breath. “My goodness, Marla, you are in very good shape for a lady your age.”

  “I do Tae Bo,” Marla said, mock-punching the air. “You gotta love that Billy Blanks fella on them Tae Bo videos. A right good-lookin’ boy, he is. An’ ya’d never know it to look at ‘im, but he’s almost sixty. Hell, he an’ I could date, if he wasn’t already married.” Her wrinkled face spread out in a wide grin. “Tho’ I wouldn’t be opposed to havin’ a nice little bedroom affair with him, no siree.”

  Shirley had to work hard to contain her laughter. Things really are different here in the big city, she thought to herself. Nobody over sixty even had sex back in Statesville, let alone talked about it in public with a total stranger.

  The elevator dinged and the doors slid open onto the fourth floor. “Nurse-anesthetists’ unit is fourth door down on the left,” Marla said, pointing it out. “I’d walk ya there myself, but your department chair don’t like me too much. I got this nasty habit o’ tellin’ her how to do her job, ya see. I used to be head ether girl back in ‘Nam, put more people under the gas than your new boss’ got hairs on her head. But they won’t let me anywhere near the gas round here ‘cause I don’t got a fancy-schmantzy state certificate.” She clucked and shook her head. “So I’m stuck doin’ bedpans an’ IVs. Oh well. It’s a livin,’ I reckon.” She took an index card out of her scrub pocket, wrote a number down on it, and handed it to Shirley. “That’s my pager number if ya ever need anything. I been workin’ at this here hospital nigh on forty years now, an’ there ain’t nothin’ I either don’t already know or can’t find out about for ya right quick. Ya enjoy yer first day now.”