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

by Hughes, Jill Elaine

  Marla started to waddle off, then stopped short. She glanced over both shoulders, then leaned towards Shirley, taking care to keep her voice low. “An’ when it comes to yer new boss Beth Peking, don’t say I didn’t warn ya. They call her The Dragon Lady round here, an’ with good reason.”

  Shirley wasn’t sure what to say about that, so she just smiled and nodded as she watched Marla Crabtree waddle off down the hall. She took a deep breath and put her best foot forward as she stepped into her new boss’ office.

  Beth Peking was a petite Asian-American woman who looked to be in her mid-forties. Instead of nurses’ scrubs she wore a pert little silk suit with a Mandarin collar that was embroidered with red dragons. On her feet were four-inch black spike heels—totally impractical footwear for nursing—and her fingers ended in long, blood-red lacquered talons that would surely break if she ever tried to pick up a needle or turn a dial on a dosing machine. An administrative type, for sure—you couldn’t do any real nursing work dressed like that She was sitting in an easy chair by her office window, totally engrossed in a thick hospital report. Shirley knocked on the doorjamb several times, but Ms. Peking never so much as looked up.

  Rude city people, Shirley thought to herself. It was hard for her to get used to such a total lack of manners from everyone she encountered. “Excuse me,” she said in a loud voice.

  No response.

  Well, she might as well just start yelling. “Excuse me. Are you Beth Peking?”

  Her new boss sighed and finally looked up from her report. “I hear you first time you bang on door,” the petite woman hissed in a thick Chinese accent. “I not ready to talk to you yet! You wait!”

  Shirley’s jaw dropped. “Well, I never—“

  Beth Peking read two more pages in her report, then made a big show of folding it closed and slipping it into a file cabinet. She looked Shirley up and down, peering at her over her tiny red-rimmed reading glasses. When she stood, Shirley immediately understood why her new boss wore such impractical shoes—even with the four-inch spike heels, Beth Peking was barely five feet tall. The tiny, birdlike woman’s contempt for everything and everyone around her was almost palpable. “Now I ready to talk to you,” she squawked. “Sit down.”

  Without a word, Shirley obeyed. Between the nasty demeanor and the dragons stitched on her coat, it was pretty clear why everyone called her new boss The Dragon Lady behind her back.

  “I know who you are,” The Dragon Lady squawked at her. “You Shirley Daniels. Today your first day. And you late.”

  “I know—I’m sorry. I had some trouble finding—“

  “You no say sorry to me, Shirley Daniels. I no like sorry. You just say you wrong and you move on. Easy?”

  Shirley flushed and her eyebrows pursed in bewilderment. She had no idea what to make of this woman. “Umm, I guess I was wrong, then. OK?”

  “That better. You ever be late again, you fired.”

  Shirley felt her stomach twinge as she stared into The Dragon Lady’s fiery black eyes. “I understand,” she said in a small voice. Suddenly she understood why the hospital had used an outside recruiter to hire her for this job. No nurse in her right mind would choose to work for The Dragon Lady if they knew about her ahead of time.

  The Dragon Lady pulled a fat file off her desk and dropped it in Shirley’s lap. “Employee packet,” she chirped. “You fill out. You fill out and bring back to me in one hour. One hour only. It take you more than one hour, you fired. Go two doors down to nurse-anesthetist lounge to fill out. When you finished, I take you on hospital tour. OK?”

  With a heavy heart, Shirley took the packet and headed down the hall to the lounge, dragging her feet all the way. She’d gotten more than she’d bargained for in moving here, that was for sure. Working in Raleigh wasn’t exactly shaping up the way she’d hoped it would. Even after all the bad things that had happened back in Statesville, it was paradise compared to how her life was turning out in the big city.

  On the bright side, she supposed it could only get better from here.

  She flipped through the scores of pages of the employee packet. The first part was asking mostly for basic information—name, address, age, social security number—but then she despaired at the reams and reams of pages asking for her nursing school grade transcripts, a complete employment history dating all the way back to her first job in high school, even an essay section where she was supposed to write five hundred words on what being a nurse-anesthetist meant to her. She glanced at the clock and saw that fifteen minutes had already gone by.

  “I might as well just quit now,” she said aloud to the empty air, blinking back tears. “There’s no way I can get this all done in forty-five minutes.”

  “Yeah, the Dragon Lady can be a real bitch,” a gruff male voice said just behind her. “I don’t know why the hospital didn’t fire her years ago. Must be the nursing shortage.”

  Shirley’s head whipped around fast enough for her to get a mouthful of her own hair. A tall, lean, dark-haired stranger stood at the coffee stand just behind her. He flashed a kind smile at her as he stirred the hospital’s weak coffee in a Styrofoam cup with a pink plastic stirrer. Hardly a masculine gesture, but coming from a man like him, that hardly mattered. This man—tall, athletic, broad-shouldered, movie-star handsome despite the dull gray scrubs and two days’ of razor stubble he was wearing—would look masculine wearing an apron and kneading bread dough. He was a walking pile of testosterone.

  George Clooney, eat your heart out. This guy made George Clooney look like a dweeb.

  Shirley’s breath caught as she felt her crotch heating up at this awesome sight. She was speechless.

  “I’m Dr. Randall Hamm, by the way. I head up the Anesthesiology department here. And you are—“ The sound of his voice was like dark chocolate. Pure sex, sweet and rich.

  Yow. Maybe life in Raleigh wouldn’t be so hard after all.

  Shirley tried to introduce herself, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came out.

  Dr. Randall Hamm just smiled wider. The fact that Shirley’s mouth was moving and yet formed no words didn’t seem to faze him at all.

  Apparently the man was already aware of his effect on women. Either that, or he was completely clueless.

  “Do me a favor, willya?” Dr. Drop Dead Gorgeous said. “Don’t tell the Dragon Lady I’m stealing coffee from the nurse-anesthetists’ lounge. She’ll have my head on a platter if she finds out.”

  Shirley finally managed to locate her vocal cords. “Wh-Why?”

  “The Dragon Lady hates us docs. Doesn’t like us coming anywhere near here. She seems to think that all anesthesia procedures should be done by nurses.”

  “I’ve noticed that most of your colleagues feel the same way about us nurse anesthetists,” Shirley countered.

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Dr. Hamm said, then shrugged. “Me, I think everybody should just do their jobs and shut the hell up. But that’s just me.”

  Shirley liked this man already. Hell, she could see herself loving this man very, very soon—even though a real relationship was at the absolute bottom of her to-do list right now.

  Dr. Randall Hamm nodded towards the intimidating pile of papers the Dragon Lady had given her. “If you’re worried about filling all that stuff out before your time runs out, don’t worry about it. Just fill in the first few pages and give it back to your boss. Take the rest of the stuff home with you tonight, fill it out on your own time, and hand it in to Human Resources yourself when the Dragon Lady isn’t looking. Problem solved.”

  “But—“

  He smiled again—and this time, it wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill-handsome-man smile. It was a spectacular, twinkling, worthy-of-the-lights-of-Broadway kind of smile. The kind of smile that sells toothpaste on billboards in Times Square. The kind of smile that makes women quake in their padded nursing shoes, makes sex-starved women like Shirley Daniels cream their pants. “Look, don’t worry about the Dragon Lady,” he said. “She just likes
to scare people. If you show her you aren’t scared of her, she’ll back off. The woman’s bark is a lot worse than her bite, believe me.”

  Now it was Shirley’s time to smile. “Thanks for the advice, Dr. Hamm.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, and was out the door without even asking her name.

  Shirley whipped through the more important sections of paperwork, finished it with fifteen minutes to spare. She headed back to the Dragon Lady’s office, the white rubber soles of her nursing shoes barely touching the ground as she walked.

  She’d come to Raleigh to get away from the past. Now she’d just met the reason for her to stay.

  Three

  Shirley floated into Beth Peking’s office, a broad smile painted across her face. She dropped her pile of completed employment papers on her new boss’ desk with a flourish. “Well, I’m finished,” she sang. “When do I get started?”

  The Dragon Lady looked up from her own pile of paperwork, her brightly painted mouth pulled into a thin, angry line. “You done already? You not supposed to be done yet!”

  “Well, I am,” Shirley replied. “And I must tell you, Ms. Peking, that I’m very excited to be on staff here at University Hospital.”

  The Dragon Lady blinked twice. She clearly wasn’t prepared for Shirley to be so confident. “No, you not. You just country bumpkin who hard up for a job.” Her voice was a sharpened pitchfork aimed right at Shirley’s head.

  Shirley forced a laugh. No way was she going to let this crazy woman get to her. “Oh, Ms. Peking! You are so funny! What a great joke! You should go on David Letterman.”

  The Dragon Lady’s thick black eyebrows mashed together, forming a caterpillar of sorts. Her face turned as red as her silk mandarin jacket for a moment. Then she seemed to relax. “Nice to have you aboard,” she chirped, a twinge of defeat quavering in her voice. Shirley obviously wouldn’t be an easy target for her ire. But that didn’t mean the woman wouldn’t keep trying. “You new, so you bottom of totem pole. You get only most boring anesthesia assignments.”

  Taking Dr. Randall Hamm’s advice well in stride, Shirley just grinned even wider. “That’s OK,” she chirped. “Things were never very exciting back home in Statesville, after all.” A lie, but she wasn’t about to let The Dragon Lady know that.

  The Dragon Lady blinked again and made a low growling sound in her throat. “You be quiet now,” the tiny woman spurted. She sounded like a Chinese restaurant waitress with a death wish. “Now I take you to operating suite. Show you around.” She stood up and dashed into the hallway, her spike heels clattering on the linoleum. She stopped short, turned around, wagged her tiny scarlet-tipped index finger in Shirley’s face. “You be quiet on tour. No talk! I talk only! You don’t say anything, understand? ”

  “Oh, I understand,” Shirley sang. “I’m sure I have a lot to learn.”

  The Dragon Lady made that low growl sound in her throat again, just like a real dragon. Shirley figured it would only be a matter of time before the woman actually started breathing fire.

  She followed The Dragon Lady up and down the busy hospital hallways, in and out of two elevators, and through a set of swinging double doors emblazoned with “CAUTION: STERILE AREA. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY”. The Dragon Lady wasn’t exactly wearing sterile attire, but that didn’t seem to bother her at all. She plowed right through the swinging doors so hard that one of them nearly ended up knocking Shirley flat onto the linoleum.

  But Shirley wasn’t worried. The one thing she knew for sure was that the Dragon Lady was leading her into the Surgery and Anesthesiology department. And that meant Dr. Randall Hamm couldn’t be too far away. Her crotch buzzed at the thought of seeing him again.

  And then suddenly—almost as if he’d read her thoughts right out of the air—Dr. Randall Hamm appeared out of nowhere, still stirring his Styrofoam cup of weak coffee. Beth Peking ran right into him, her elaborately coiffed head knocking him somewhere around the belly button. The man was easily almost three feet taller than the Dragon Lady, even with her heels.

  “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Beth Peking and her latest victim—er, ahh, employee. Hello there, Ms. Peking. How’s tricks?”

  The Dragon Lady teetered backwards on her heels away from Dr. Hamm’s middle and fumed. “I no do tricks, Dr. Hamm. I no hooker.”

  Dr. Hamm laughed. “Ah, Beth Peking. Always with her head in the gutter.” He shook his head, mock-sad. “A tragedy that such a filthy mind is wasted in these sterile halls. By the way, Ms. Peking, where are your scrubs? You’re in a sterile area. As lovely as your silk blazer and heels are, they weren’t made for the OR.”

  The Dragon Lady flushed red and muttered something unintelligible. So much for breathing fire.

  Dr. Hamm turned to Shirley. “Nice to see you again—ahhh, miss. Welcome aboard. Try to stay out of trouble.” And with a flash of his million-dollar smile and a fatherly wink, he was gone. He still hadn’t asked her name.

  Shirley watched him go with her mouth hanging open. I guess you only get one chance with that guy, she mused. And she’d blown it. Big time.

  The Dragon Lady picked up on Shirley’s malaise right away. “Oh, I see you meet Dr. Hamm! He big boss around here. He no be interested in nurses, so you just forget it.”

  Shirley felt her cheeks burn. “Wh-what do you mean?” she stammered, feigning ignorance.

  The Dragon Lady laughed like a wind-up doll. “Oh, you can’t fool me, Miss Shirley. You got hots for Dr. Hamm. It written all over your face.” She erupted in her annoying high-pitched laugh again. “All the ladies here at University Hospital got hots for Dr. Hamm. Even me—I no lie to you. He very, very cute. More handsome than George Clooney.” She snickered. “But you don’t stand chance. He no like anybody. He no date nobody at all.”

  “Really? You’re sure?”

  The Dragon Lady nodded. “Oh, I sure. Dr. Hamm, he got no social life. All he do is work, work, work. We all flirt with him. He never notice.” She snorted. “Hmph. He probably gay.”

  Shirley’s heart sank. Just her luck that the one man who managed to set her heart aflutter in her otherwise dismal new life wasn’t even remotely interested in her—or worse, batted for the other team.

  “You come with me now,” The Dragon Lady chirped. “I give you tour of OR. And be quiet. No disturb patients.”

  Shirley followed her boss around the operating department as she teetered on her ridiculous spike heels, squawking at the top of her lungs in her thick Chinese accent as she showed Shirley all the tools and equipment she’d need to do her job. But Shirley barely heard a word of what the annoying woman said. All she could think of was the fact that she was horny as hell, and the only man from miles around she wanted to get naked with wasn’t the least bit interested in her.

  Maybe leaving Statesville was the worst thing she’d ever done. It certainly felt that way.

  ****

  Dr. Randall Hamm knew better than to get too friendly with the nurses. Especially the nurse-anesthetists. For one thing, he was no good at dealing with women socially. They were like exotic foreign objects to him, fragile and easily broken if not handled with the utmost of care. And it wasn’t like the nurse-anesthetists ever stayed around for long, anyway. With a boss like Beth Peking, who would? Between the national nursing shortage and the personnel problems, the turnover rate for nurses in his department was off the charts. What was the point in him investing more than the faintest of pleasantries with the new nurse, anyway? As cute as she was, she probably wouldn’t last a week. He didn’t even know her name, and that was fine by him, thank you very much. The less he knew about her, the better.

  Or so he tried to convince himself. There was something about the new girl that bothered him. Well, not so much bothered him as unnerved him. Dr. Randall Hamm was a notorious loner, after all. Always absorbed in his work or his quest for research grants, he wasn’t accustomed to noticing a hot new nurse. Hell, he wasn’t accustomed to noticing anyone.

  But he’d n
oticed the new girl, all right. Big time.

  And his cock was still noticing her. Thick, hard, and throbbing, it threatened to tear a hole in his scrubs. Lucky for him he’d managed to duck off down the hallway to his private office before anyone noticed.

  Dr. Hamm was out of his element. Dealing with people—and their unpredictable behavior—had never really been his forte. He was a researcher at heart. He’d always been happiest in the lab, tinkering with anesthesia concoctions or coming up with new and improved OR management strategies. To him, sex was just a primal urge, an itch to scratch and then be done with. It wasn’t something that was supposed to complicate your work, or distract you from it. He’d always been an anonymous one-night-stand kind of man. Relationships came ridden with traps that were best avoided. But whether he liked it or not, there was a new game in town—a woman he didn’t think he stood an icicle’s chance in hell of avoiding for long.

  Not as long as his cock had something to say about it, anyway.

  Four

  Shirley sat neck-deep in her old-style clawfoot bathtub at her new Raleigh apartment, exhausted from her first day on the job at University Hospital. She knew she had no right to be tired, since she hadn’t done any actual anesthesia work. Her entire first day had been preoccupied with dull administrative tasks and following her annoying boss around the hospital like a lost puppy—a walk in the park compared to some of the marathon OR sessions she’d worked through back in Statesville. But the dull drudgery of her job wasn’t what had her so exhausted. Not by a long shot.