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

by Hughes, Jill Elaine

  It would haunt him for the rest of his career, the rest of his life—hell, maybe even into his next life. It went without saying that he’d probably never work as a nurse ever again. Hell, he might not work anywhere ever again. With his current set of references, he’d be lucky to get a job flipping burgers.

  Billy was unemployed, incompetent, and a borderline murderer. Things could not possibly be any worse.

  Except they were.

  The love of Billy’s life was back in Statesville, and Billy had lost her forever.

  Billy might only have known Dana for a day, but he felt like he’d known her since before he was born. He’d heard stories about love at first sight, destiny, the notion that God created one person for you to love forever and arranged it for you even before your soul is formed in the womb.

  Before yesterday, Billy had thought those stories were just silly fairy tales. But now he knew they were true.

  Billy had no idea where he would go. He had no idea what he would do. At this point, he wasn’t even sure how long he’d survive.

  ****

  Dana Johnson sat up to her neck in suds in her bathtub, crying her eyes out. Today was the worst day of her life.

  A bunch of people had died at the hospital today. People died at hospitals every day, but today was different. None of those people had to die—at least, not today. It had all been a big mistake. Dana had tried to help save one of them, an eighty-nine-year-old woman who had overdosed on morphine. By the time she’d gotten to the poor woman’s room, she was already well beyond help. All Dana could do was stand back and watch as the duty nurse stopped bagging the ventilator and the attending physician verbally declared the time of death.

  In all her years as a nurse, Dana had never watched a patient die before. She was a nurse-anesthetist who worked in operating rooms putting mostly healthy people under anesthesia. The high-risk cases were always assigned to anesthesiologists, MDs. It was clean, simple, mostly low-risk work. She’d never really worked in the trenches, not even in nursing school. Back in college, her ER rotation had consisted mostly of removing splinters and helping set broken bones. No heart attacks, no car accidents, no messy, gruesome, senseless death. Today had been her first time.

  In a way, it was almost as if she’d lost her virginity—but not in a joyful, coming-of-age sense. More like in a soiled, loss-of-innocence sense.

  Which brought her to the main reason she was so distraught.

  The hospital administration had blamed Billy Hartzell for the deaths, had fired him, and had run him out of town on a rail. They’d all but tarred-and-feathered him. Dana had even overheard one of the senior nurses whispering that Billy was lucky he wasn’t in jail.

  Dana knew in her heart that Billy hadn’t done anything wrong. She might not know all the details, but she knew whatever had happened, it was an honest mistake, something that could—and did—happen to anyone. Dana couldn’t count the number of times she’d seen nurses—and even doctors—make careless mistakes that had hurt patients. She knew that plenty of patients even died when medicines were switched, wounds got needlessly infected, when doctors and nurses couldn’t be bothered to make their duty rounds in a timely fashion. But it usually got swept under the rug, because it was usually just too hard to determine who or what was really responsible. It was usually a perfect storm of multiple things, none of which were ever attributable to just one person. Or even if it was, that one person had powerful friends who covered his ass.

  The same was probably true today. For whatever reason, Billy had been the one to take the fall for someone else’s mistake. Today had been a special case. A special case that had ended a lot of lives. Including her own.

  Billy was gone. Nobody knew where he was. And nobody cared—except her. Dana feared she would never see him again.

  And if Dana never saw Billy again, she wasn’t sure that life was worth living at all.

  She’d never felt pain like this. It was agony, a torture to end all tortures. Billy was her soulmate. She didn’t know much else about him, but she knew that much to be true. She’d known it from the minute she’d laid eyes on him that he belonged to her, and she to him. In the very brief time they’d known each other, they’d barely touched—barely even talked. And yet, Dana was tethered to him with an invisible silken cord. The brief joy she’d experienced in his presence was replaced with something that felt like death itself.

  Dana squeezed her eyes shut, sank down even lower in the suds, and began to sob. She sobbed until her chest and throat ached, until she thought her whole body was going to split apart.

  With Billy gone, Dana felt her life was over before it had even begun. She was still a twenty-six-year-old virgin. She was still all alone in the world. And now she might never have another chance to be with the man that she knew in her heart was the love of her life.

  A part of Dana wanted to get up out of that tub and drive off into the night in search of him. But another part of her—by far the largest part of her—just wanted to crawl into a deep, dark hole and die. Dana had never been the type to take crazy risks, after all. She was far too prim, proper, reserved—and damaged—for that. Confrontation had never been one of her strong suits—at least not since dirty old Captain Masters had manhandled her all those years ago. Maybe she and Billy just weren’t meant to be. Maybe Dana Johnson was destined to die a virgin old maid. Maybe she just wasn’t meant to be happy, ever.

  Or maybe not.

  Dana gritted her teeth and tightened her fists deep under the hot sudsy water. With the last ounce of her will, she dragged herself up and out of the tub and marched down the hallway naked. She didn’t bother to dry off; steamy water fell off her body in sheets and soaked the carpet underneath her feet. She grabbed her bathrobe off the back of her bedroom door and put it on.

  Dana glanced at the clock and saw it was already well past eleven. A thunderstorm raged outside, with thunderclaps rattling the windowpanes and heavy rain pounding down hard on the low roof of Dana’s small bungalow. She was due back in to work at seven the next morning. It hardly seemed the ideal time for her to go traipsing off across the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of her lost love. She wasn’t even sure which direction Billy had headed—and whichever way he went, he was long gone by now. The mountain roads were treacherous during heavy rains, especially at night. What would be the point of chasing Billy across the state when she might drive off a cliff and die?

  No, chasing Billy down just wasn’t an option right now. But Dana wasn’t about to let him go that easily. The old Dana Johnson might have given up and just let him slip through her fingers, but this was the new Dana Johnson. The new Dana Johnson wasn’t going to let Billy get away.

  At this point Dana had no idea how she would manage to reunite with the love of her life. But she knew that she would. Somehow, someday. It was just a question of when.

  In the meantime, Dana knew that she had a lot more work to do when it came to becoming the New and Improved Dana Johnson. She needed to conquer her fears, to become less timid and more outgoing. She needed to be strong in the presence of men, and to become comfortable with her sexuality for the first time in her life. And she didn’t just need to be strong—she needed to be brave.

  In short, she needed to finally grow up.

  The next morning, when Dana reported for duty in Dr. Marx’s lockdown Psychiatric Unit, she would begin the first step in her journey.

  Thirteen

  George McGill, Covington Community Hospital’s longtime head of patient safety, sat behind his massive oak desk in his heavily paneled office in the Old Wards building. Rebecca Marsh, the hospital’s flame-haired, tightly wound head of HR, sat across from him in one of his overstuffed wingback chairs. A huge stack of files filled the space between them.

  “How’s the paper trail look?” McGill asked his colleague. He pulled off his reading glasses and polished them with his tie. “I don’t want any loose ends, you know.”

  “The paper trail’s good,” Rebecca re
plied. “As good as we could make it, anyway.”

  The older man’s thick gray eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

  “We can establish via the duty nurse’s log that Hartzell dropped off the oversized IV bags,” she explained, opening up a file and pointing to a lined sheet of paper. “But we can’t necessarily document that Hartzell grabbed the wrong ones on purpose.”

  McGill blinked. “But he admitted doing it on purpose.”

  “No, not exactly. He said that the oversized IV bags were the only ones available in Supply, so those were the ones he took.” She pushed her reading glasses down her nose and looked over them at him. “There’s a big difference.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Rebecca sighed and slapped the file folder shut. “George, five people died of meds overdoses. The state regulatory officials are gonna come marching in here demanding answers. They’ll go through all the personnel files, procedures, and patient documentation we have, looking for holes in our system. The more holes they find, the more we’ll get fined, and the more funding we’ll lose.”

  “The only hole in our system was that damned stupid kid who called himself a nurse,” McGill snarled. “Where the hell did you find a male nurse, anyhow? No wonder he messed up Nursing is women’s work.”

  Rebecca sighed again. She was accustomed to George McGill’s old-fashioned male chauvinism, but sometimes he just couldn’t see the forest for the trees. He was the patient-safety executive here, damn it—why didn’t he drop the sexism crap and look at the real problem?

  “Rebecca, I called you in here to tell me how you’ve cleaned up this little mess,” McGill said curtly. “And instead you come in here with a stack of paperwork and accusations that this hospital is negligent? You’ve got a lot of gall, missy. You better shape up, or I’ll have your job.”

  She rolled her eyes. “George, cut the crap. Even you know that these kinds of accidents are almost never just one person’s fault. It’s usually a whole bunch of people who are partly responsible, directly and indirectly, along with a whole bunch of complicated, outdated procedures that force people to make mistakes.”

  McGill scoffed and narrowed his gaze. “Oh, I know it, all right,” he said. “I just don’t admit it, is all. In my line of work, I’ve learned it’s always best not to admit fault if you can avoid it.”

  “George, what happened today was a big wake-up call. This hospital needs a total revamp of supply procedures. Nursing-floor procedures, too. If we don’t do something right away, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens again. You know it, I know it—and most of all, the state regulators will know it.”

  McGill took a pencil from a cup on his desk and rolled it back and forth between his fingers. He didn’t speak for almost a minute. He finally put the pencil back in its place, stared Rebecca down for another moment or two, then spoke. “Fair enough. What do you propose we do about it?”

  “Well, I think the first thing to do is for us to interview each and every staffer who was on the floor in Geriatrics yesterday, across all shifts. Supply people, too. I hate to say it, but I think we might have carted Billy Hartzell off too soon.”

  ****

  Billy’s eyes smarted with tears as he drove across the western Tennessee border into Arkansas. He’d called his employment agency from the road the night before, hoping they might be able to find him a job—any job—somewhere. A hard, unfamiliar voice had told him that given what had happened in Statesville, his relationship with the agency was hereby terminated, and tersely ended the call. He was afraid to call his parents in Atlanta. News of the deaths at Covington Community Hospital had been picked up on the AP wires; he figured his family had probably heard about it by now. They could put two and two together, and it would all add up to him shaming the family name.

  No, it was far better for Billy Hartzell to ride off into the sunset somewhere than shame the Hartzell name once again. His father had never gotten over the fact that Billy had chosen nursing as a career in the first place—William Hartzell, Sr. had told his son and namesake that nursing was a “sissy” career. That was three years ago, when Billy was still in college and had just declared nursing as his major. He and his father had barely spoken since—just a few noncommittal grunts and nods at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and graduation. When his father heard this latest news, it would just rub salt into any number of old wounds. He could almost see his silver-templed, pinstriped lawyer father, a traditional, dyed-in-the-wool Southern gentleman, as he sat on the overstuffed settee in the Hartzell parlor, wagging his finger in Billy’s face as he said “I told you so,” in his thick Georgia drawl.

  And that would be the least of it. Billy’s father held grudges for years. He hadn’t spoken to Billy’s eldest sister Renee for almost eight years, in fact—ever since Renee ran off and eloped with an unemployed steel worker two weeks after graduating high school.

  Somehow Billy figured his father would take the deaths of five people, accidental or not, a lot more seriously that he would his sister’s shotgun wedding. He figured it was best just to put as much distance between him and his father as possible, rather than go back to Atlanta and face the music.

  So now Billy was jobless, homeless, and very likely disowned from his family. His battered pickup truck and Army duffle bag full of clothes was all he owned in the world, along with the few thousand dollars in cash that he’d cleared out of his bank account. He was wandering rudderless, anchorless. He wasn’t on the run from the law at least, but he might as well be. He just kept heading west along the interstate, with absolutely no idea where or when he might land.

  Billy was driving through the middle of nowhere. The area was so rural there hadn’t even been an exit off the freeway for over forty miles other than a truck-weigh station. Billy searched the radio for a station playing something other than country music or religious programming, came up with nothing but static. His battered old truck didn’t have a CD player or even a tape deck, so he switched the radio off in frustration and rode on in silence.

  And silence was hardly golden at this point. Silence left Billy far too alone with his thoughts, and his thoughts were only of Dana Johnson, the girl he had left behind. The less he thought about her, the better—because every second that she crossed his mind was pure physical torture, almost as if his body were being torched from within. He needed a distraction—any distraction—to protect him from himself.

  No, silence was definitely not an option. He switched the radio back on, searched for the most annoying fire-and-brimstone radio preacher he could find, and cranked up the volume.

  Billy’s cell phone buzzed in the passenger seat beside him. He glanced at the caller ID, which read “PRIVATE NUMBER.” He ignored it. The phone stopped ringing. He switched it off and tossed it into the glove compartment.

  If Billy never saw or spoke to another human being again, he would be a happy man.

  If only things were that simple.

  ****

  McGill sat tapping his pencil absently on the desktop while he watched Rebecca make the call. He wasn’t crazy about his underling’s idea, but he knew that with the state regulators already breathing down his neck, he probably didn’t have a lot of options at this point. Rebecca picked up the phone, dialed, held the receiver to her ear for what seemed like a very long time, then hung up.

  “Well?” McGill asked, drumming his pencil hard enough to leave a mark on the varnish.

  “He didn’t answer,” Rebecca replied. “And his voicemail is full. He obviously doesn’t want to be reached.”

  “I wouldn’t either, if I were him.”

  Rebecca clucked. “Point taken. But we’re going to have to reach him somehow if you want to pass the state inspection. We might want to look into hiring a private investigator to track him down.”

  McGill’s thin lips pursed into his pathetic version of a frown. “You know, it was your idea to run him out of here on a rail in the first place.”

  “I know,
George. But I was acting under the advice of the hospital general counsel. We all panicked. With five dead people on the same ward, it seems that none of us were thinking straight.”

  “You can say that again,” he snapped. “The regulators are due here next week. If you really think that this Hartzell character needs to be here for the inspection, then you do whatever you have to do to get him here. I’ll sign off on whatever requisitions you need. Just get it done.”

  “Can do, sir,” Rebecca said, and got up to leave.

  As she turned on her heel and headed for the door, she smiled secretly to herself. Because though she did believe that having Billy Hartzell on hand for the state regulatory inspection might help the hospital’s case, that wasn’t the real reason she was so desperate to track him down. No, she had her own personal reasons for wanting him to come back. Secret reasons.

  Billy Hartzell’s back was up against the proverbial wall. Rebecca Marsh knew that better than anyone. Billy was a hot, redblooded young man, even if he was a lousy nurse and a legal liability. Rebecca had wanted that hot young body of his ever since she first laid eyes on him by the employee soda machine. Sure, she’d been part of the decision to run him out of town, but like most other people at the hospital that day, she hadn’t been thinking straight.

  But now Rebecca was thinking straight, as straight as an arrow. She knew exactly what needed to happen next. And she hoped that once he was back in town, Billy Hartzell would have no choice but to give her exactly what she wanted.

  Fourteen

  Joanna lay diagonally across the huge California king-sized bed in her master bedroom. The hospital had discharged her an hour ago after her condition had stabilized a bit. The ER physician had written her a prescription for prenatal vitamins and given her a referral for a good obstetrician in the area. She’d somehow managed to drive herself home without passing out, but had barely made it upstairs to her bedroom before she started feeling woozy and nauseous again.