Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (22 page)

“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 noticed 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.

Shirley Daniels, countrified nurse anesthetist and fish-out-of-water in the big city, was in serious need of a serious lay. And if she didn’t get one soon, she just might need serious medical attention.

Shirley had read about being “lovesick” in books—mostly historical romance novels where ladies swooned at candlelit balls and men brawled and dueled with pistols to blow off pent-up sexual frustration. But she’d never actually believed that being
lovesick
was possible in the real world.

Until now.

Shirley’s entire body was an itchy ball of fire. Her head ached and throbbed, her mind was filled with nothing but racing, raging thoughts about hot sex. The pit of her stomach churned and rocked—she couldn’t keep anything down, not even saltine crackers. Her legs felt heavy and sluggish, and her crotch was molten lava. She could barely walk. She could barely think. Hell, she could barely
breathe.

And it was all Dr. Randall Hamm’s fault.

Damn him.
Damn him, his movie-star looks, hot bod, and indifferent attitude straight to hell.

Shirley was beginning to understand why Beth Peking—The Dragon Lady—was so annoying and reviled by everyone. Beth Peking lusted after Dr. Randall Hamm, too, after all. And Shirley supposed if one day of unrequited lust for Dr. Randall made her feel this awful, she figured that months or years of it would make her just as loony as her new boss.

Shirley’s hand strayed below the hot, raspberry-scented suds and found the space between her legs.

She found her seam deep in the dark recesses of the steaming bathwater, and parted the curtains of her sex with her index finger. Her cunt was slick with a combo of bathwater and her own salty juices. She ran her fingers lightly up and down her slit, feeling herself get slicker and hotter with every stroke.

Shirley hoped that by getting herself off here in her relaxing evening bath, she’d stop feeling like such a lovesick hothead. But the exact opposite was happening. Instead of relieving her pent-up frustration, each stroke of her fingers against her cunt just made her that much more hot and bothered.

She wouldn’t last a week in Raleigh at this rate.

She rubbed herself harder and faster, concentrating on making herself come. Yet there was no relief in sight. She brought her washcloth and even an oblong bar of rose-scented soap into the act. No dice. All that happened was her cunt got hotter and more swollen, her head throbbed even more, and her whole body became a live wire of pent-up sexual frustration. If she were a fair maiden in a Regency novel, she would have swooned (hell, maybe even
died
) from a nasty case of the vapors a long time ago.

If Shirley didn’t come soon, her head would explode.

Time to bring out the big guns.

Shirley looked up and eyed the detachable shower massager that hung from a hook on the wall over her head. She reached up to grab it, fiddled with the controls until she found the heavy-jet setting—the punishing spray designed only for pressure-cleaning dirty bathtubs. A slow smile spread across her face as a thoroughly naughty idea formed in her mind.

She tested the stinging water jets against the palm of her hand. Satisfied with the pressure, she slid the pulsating shower massager between her legs, aiming the spray directly at her clit. The sensations were intense—Shirley’s eyelids screwed shut and she gritted her teeth as she felt the blood rushing to swell her already white-hot clit. Her deepest muscles clenched as the pulsing waterfall hit her cunt, sending her closer and closer to the edge. Her whole body was an electric current, jumping back and forth between two charged poles, ready to explode into a million scorching sparks.

And finally, just when she thought she could stand it no longer, Shirley finally came. Her hips bucked as she fell over the precipice, becoming one with the powerful waterfall between her legs until her whole being ran rampant like Niagara Falls in springtime.

Her orgasm hit like a runaway train, exploding up and down her entire body. Her hips bucked and her limbs thrashed wildly, sending steaming bathwater splashing over the sides of the tub. Obscene sounds fell out of her mouth and ricocheted off the bathroom tile. It was truly an orgasm for the history books.

But even after all that, Shirley wasn’t even close to being satisfied.

Time to take things up a notch or two.

She ran her hands up and down the slick stainless-steel handle of the shower massager. Firm, hard, smooth, easy to lubricate. Its heft felt good in her hands, the perfect weight and thickness for fucking. She unscrewed the massager top from the handle and let the water run through the plain round hole at the handle’s end. The resulting stream was light, but not without a little pressure. The scored edges of the opening were a little rough, so she wrapped her damp washcloth around it for protection.

Safe sex with a cold metal dildo,
she thought with a chuckle.
Classic.

She was still sitting in the hot sudsy bath, and she’d already finished one orgasm, so she knew she was plenty lubed enough to fuck herself with a stainless-steel plumbing appliance that had itself seen better days. The only question was, was she that desperate?

Yes I am
, Shirley thought to herself, plenty embarrassed.
Yes I am.

But just as she was about to cram the thing up her cunt for a nice long solo fuck, she heard a knock on her apartment door. A
loud
knock.

Shirley sat bold upright. Who could it be? She didn’t know anybody in Raleigh, except for Marla, Dr. Randall Hamm, and The Dragon Lady. And she seriously doubted any of them would be showing up at her apartment door on the third floor of a rundown Victorian at eleven o’clock at night. Besides, they didn’t even know where she lived.

Shirley got out of the tub and pulled on her bathrobe without bothering to dry off. The pounding at her heavy wooden apartment door got louder and louder. Whoever it was, Shirley guessed they were angry. She pulled her keychain out of her purse, which had a small spray can of Mace attached to it. She was home alone in a strange town where she knew no one, and she was taking no chances.

Shirley unlocked the door and opened it slowly, leaving the lock-chain attached. She peeked through the crack, and nearly fainted dead away at what she saw.

Framed in the tiny space between the heavy wooden door and the cracked, peeling doorjamb was a tall, buff, and handsome man who looked to be in his late twenties.

And he was wearing nothing but a towel. A
damp
towel.

“H-hi there,” she stammered through the crack. “Umm, can I help you, sir?”

You could sure as hell help me
, she thought silently to herself.

“I’m real sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” the gorgeous specimen of the male species drawled back, a thick mountain accent pulling at the edges of his words. “But I think you must have some kinda plumbing problem, ‘cause I got me some water a-leakin’ down from my bathroom ceilin’. Would ya mind if I showed it to ya?”

You can show me anything you want, baby,
Shirley thought to herself. She had to bite her tongue to keep from saying it out loud.

“We should prob’ly call the landlord,” the man went on, shifting back and forth on his feet. Shirley could see the outline of his formidable equipment sculpted against the threadbare blue towel he held around his middle, and the sight was enough to drive her wild.

“You know, sir, that water dripping down is probably just because I had a little—accident when I was taking my bath,” she said, twirling a lock of her damp hair nervously around and around on her finger. “I—ahem—
slipped
and ended up splashing a bunch of water out onto the floor.” Not entirely the truth, but not entirely a lie, either. “So I don’t think it’s necessary to call the landlord. But you’re welcome to come inside and take a look for yourself, just to make sure I don’t have any broken pipes or anything.” She batted her eyelashes at him shamelessly, doing her best to play the role of the classic Southern damsel-in-distress. “What’d you say your name was, sir?”

He smiled, flashing brilliant white teeth. “Didn’t, ma’am. But it’s Ed. Ed Main. I live right downstairs from ya. Been meanin’ to come an’ properly introduce myself, but ain’t had occasion to before now.” He glanced down at the damp towel around his middle. “Hope you don’t mind my bad manners, ma’am, but I didn’t wanna waste no time a-gettin’ dressed when water was a-rainin’ down on my head. Had to come see what the whole mess was about.”

“No problem at all,” she sang. “Just one minute, if you please.” She shut the door momentarily, disengaged the chain from the slide, reopened the door. “I’m Shirley. Shirley Daniels. Pleased to meet you, Ed. Won’t you come in?”