Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (47 page)

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 replied. “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.

Was this really what it was like to be pregnant? Weak, dizzy, and sick all the time? If so, Joanna wasn’t sure she wanted any part of it. And it wasn’t as if the baby would be joining a happy, loving home, either. Harlan was MIA most of the time these days, and whenever he was around, he was insufferable.

Joanna closed her eyes and shook her head. She really didn’t want to think about Harlan or the state of her marriage. Not right now. All she could concentrate on right now was not throwing up.

Joanna closed her eyes and tried to get some sleep. Just as she was about to drift off, however, the phone rang.

She groaned and rolled herself over to the other side of the bed so she could reach the nightstand phone. “Hello?”

“Joanna, hon, it’s Maryam. I’m sorry to bother you right now, I know they just discharged you. But we have a bit of a situation over here.”

Joanna rolled her eyes. She could only imagine what that meant. “Go on.”

“Well, I hate to say it Joanna, but it would probably just be easiest if you came back on over here.”

Joanna scoffed. “I don’t think so, Maryam. I can barely move.” And it was true. Joanna had never been so exhausted in her life. Her entire body felt as if it was made of lead.

“All right hon. I’ll just have to tell you straight out, then.” Maryam paused to clear her throat. Several times. Finally, she spoke. “Two orderlies found your husband passed out in his private office this afternoon. Naked. With a hard-on.”

Joanna sat bolt upright. In an instant, all the fatigue and nausea melted away.
“What?”

“I think you heard me the first time, hon,” Maryam clucked. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I saw it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Luck would have it, I was the one who had to wake him up. I’ve never had to pull out the smelling salts for anything like this before.”

“Oh my God, Maryam. I—I don’t even know what to say.”

“I really don’t want to make things sound any worse than they already do, hon, but when I was reviving your beloved husband, my ladylike intuition told me that he had—well—engaged in sexual activity very recently. I thought you’d like to know.”

Joanna groaned as she felt the nausea gripping her body again. But it was nausea of a different kind. Instead of morning sickness, it was the realization that her marriage really was over. If what Maryam had said was true—and she had no reason to believe it wasn’t—Harlan had cheated on her. And on hospital premises to boot. While she was pregnant. And in the ER.

It was unforgivable.

“I’m not coming over there,” Joanna snarled. “No way, no how. You tell Harlan he can rot in hell. No way is he ever coming home to this house, either. We’re getting a divorce. And I’m keeping everything.” She slammed down the phone.

Joanna surprised even herself with that reaction. Maybe it was just the pregnancy hormones talking. Or maybe she was finally at the end of her rope.

She settled back against the pillows and began to sob.

****

Dana Johnson arrived at the Psychiatric ward bright and early the next morning. She signed in with the guard on duty, collected her security badge and panic button. Dr. Marx was waiting for her on the other side of the security door.

“Glad you could make it, Miss Johnson,” Dr. Marx greeted her as she came in. “It’s unfortunate that Mr. Hartzell can no longer join us.”

Dana just shrugged. She didn’t want to give too much away where Billy Hartzell was concerned.

Dr. Marx motioned for her to follow him. “I have found someone else to be your partner in these sessions, though. I think you’ll like him.”

Dana followed Dr. Marx down the stark gray main hallway of the psych ward until they came to a small room. The room was empty save for two metal folding chairs. “Craig will be joining us in just a moment,” Dr. Marx said.

“Craig?”

“Craig Miller. He’ll be taking Billy’s place in the experiments. We’ll still be getting started with them this morning, right on schedule.”

Dana’s stomach fluttered a bit. “But—what if I don’t like him?”

“Don’t worry, you will. I’ve known Craig for a long time. And he’s a part-time orderly here on the ward, so he already knows the patients very well.”

As if on cue, a huge, muscular man with a hard face and a crew cut lumbered in. “Hiya, Doc,” he said in a thick backwoods drawl. “Is this the lady?” He looked Dana up and down, and seemed to like what he saw.

“Yes, Craig, it is. This is Dana Johnson. Dana, meet Craig Miller. Craig was in the Marines before joining the hospital staff a few years ago, so I promise you that you’ll be perfectly safe when you’re in with the patients.”

Dana took one look at Craig and winced. She was sure the ex-Marine would keep her safe from the patients. She just wasn’t sure she would be safe with Craig.

Dana was having second thoughts. Maybe participating in these psychiatry experiments wasn’t such a good idea after all, cash bonus or no cash bonus. Dana heard one of her mother’s favorite sayings echo through her brain—
nothing is ever free.

“Ummm, is it possible to do a trial run before we get to the actual experiment?” Dana asked meekly.

Dr. Marx sighed. “I’m afraid not. We’re on a strict timeline for these experiments, partially due to staffing constraints, but mostly because the application deadline for my research grant is next Monday and I’ll need to have the data in time to include in my grant request.”

Oh, so that’s how it was then. Dana’s opinion of Dr. Marx just dropped through the floor. He had made all kinds of overtures to her and Billy about how this work would be for the benefit of the patients, when it was really all about money. Well, two could play that game. Dana decided she would do the absolute bare minimum expected of her in order to get her cash bonus. That, and she hoped taking this little leap of faith into the snake pit just might help give her the confidence she needed to get Billy back. And hopefully, she wouldn’t die or get raped in the process.

Dr. Marx led Dana and Craig down another long, narrow hallway that was even darker and bleaker than the first. After several twists and turns, they landed at a reinforced steel door. The gray-bearded doctor took a heavy ring of keys out of his lab coat pocket, unlocked three deadbolts, and pushed open the door. “The patient had already been restrained for this first session, Miss Johnson, so you will be perfectly safe. But Craig will be here in case anything happens.”

The doctor led them both into the sad little room, which was really no more than a prison cell. A pathetic human being sat tied down and straitjacketed in a hard wooden chair in the far corner. Dana felt a surge of pity at the sight of him, and gasped when she saw that in addition to being tied down like an animal, he was also gagged. His whole body trembled and shook, and a line of drool had soaked through the cloth gag and ran down one corner of his mouth and underneath his knobby chin.

There was another empty chair in the corner of the room farthest from the patient. Dr. Marx motioned for Dana to sit in it. She did. Dr. Marx opened a small compartment in the wall and pulled out a worn leatherbound book.

“For today’s session, Dana, I would like you to read aloud from this book.” He handed it to her; Dana glanced at the cover and saw it was an ancient copy of Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities.
Dr. Marx motioned over to the pathetic human being in the far corner. “Your patient’s name is Jerry. Jerry very much enjoys hearing books read aloud. Especially Dickens. We’ve read four Dickens books together, haven’t we, Jerry?”

Jerry didn’t respond. He took one look at Dana and cowered in terror, which left Dana baffled.

“Jerry has an irrational fear of attractive young women,” Dr. Marx explained, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s a highly unusual phobia. The doctors at the state hospital and I have been trying to discover the source of that fear over the course of several years of therapy, but so far, we haven’t been able to uncover anything. That’s where you come in.”

Dana absently turned the pages of the old leatherbound novel. The pages were yellowed with age, and some of the corners crumbled underneath her fingertips. “How will reading to him help?”

“It’s all part of the immersion therapy process. Any exposure to the object of his fears—i.e., you—will help chip away at the phobia. By having you read him a book that I know he will enjoy, I hope to establish a rapport between the two of you. It’s an important first step.” He turned to Jerry. “Jerry, this is Dana. She’ll be reading to you an hour a day over the next few days. I want you to be on your best behavior for her. If you’re good today, I’ll see about ordering your favorite meal from the cafeteria today. How’s that sound?”

Jerry made a long low growl that sounded like a cougar’s, but spoke no words in acknowledgement.

“All right then,” Dr. Marx said, dusting off his hands. “I’ll leave you two to it. I’ll just be down the hall. You’ve both got your panic buttons if anything happens. See you in an hour.”

Dr. Marx left, shutting the heavy steel door. Dana shuddered as she heard all three deadbolts engage. She was trapped in here with a lunatic and a burly Marine who kept staring at her breasts.

This wasn’t at all what she’d bargained for. And it was too late for her to back out—at least for today. There was only one thing she could do.

She cracked open the book, and began to read aloud. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . .”

****

Dr. Harlan Wilkinson lay stretched on a cot in the staff infirmary. He’d managed to put on some clean scrubs to hide his nakedness, but he was going commando since he hadn’t been able to find his boxer shorts after Maryam woke him up. He strongly suspected the dried-up old woman had swiped them as a souvenir.

Harlan was so exhausted from all his double-shifts in the OR that he’d passed out after jerking off. It was a painful reminder that he just wasn’t as young as he used to be. Ten years ago he could have worked forty-eight straight hours in a row and still spent a good six or seven more hours having sex with as much gusto as your average teenager.

No more. Now Harlan was the laughingstock of teenagers. A pair of pimply minimum-wage orderlies had found him naked in his office while sporting the biggest hard-on this side of Asheville. He’d never been so humiliated in his entire life. And word around the ward was his wife was passed out herself, had even spent some time in the ER. Fainting episodes must run in the family now.

Thoughts of Joanna instantly brought Harlan back to earth. He’d been so focused on his work lately he’d barely thought of her. And yet, when exhaustion and burnout threatened to cause a big accident in the OR, his wife had stuck her neck out to protect him from himself. And what had he done to thank her for it? Swore at her, yelled at her, then lusted after a cheap bimbo and jerked off in his office to get said cheap bimbo out of his system.

At least he hadn’t cheated on Joanna. But somehow Harlan figured that would be small consolation. His wife already had one foot out the door of their very brief marriage, and he supposed it wouldn’t take much at this point for her to take the next and final step.

The chief surgical resident had given Harlan clearance to go home as soon as he felt well enough. There were no major surgeries scheduled for forty-eight hours. The ER physicians and his chief surgical resident could handle any urgent cases that might appear in the meantime. He needed to go home and get some rest. Not to mention make one last effort to save his marriage—assuming he still had one to save, that is.

****

Dana had been reading Dickens for almost forty-five minutes. Jerry cowered in the corner, still terrified as a deer in headlights; his whole body shook hard enough to rattle his chair. Craig, her impromptu bodyguard, hulked over her, his body close enough to hers for Dana to know he bathed in Irish Spring and wore cheap Brut aftershave. Though he hadn’t laid a hand on her, Dana still felt violated in his presence. Craig was an intimidating man under any circumstances, and he wasn’t exactly making a secret of the fact he found Dana very attractive. He might not have touched her or even made a rude comment, but Dana felt she had a lot more reason to fear her bodyguard than she did the raving lunatic in the corner.

There were fifteen minutes left in this first hour of experimental therapy. At a minute or so a page, that meant Dana had fifteen more pages to read aloud in
A Tale of Two Cities
. Her mouth was dry now, and she could hardly get the words out. It irked her that Dr. Marx hadn’t bothered to offer her a glass of water or even a ten-minute bathroom break. She read the words off the page without comprehending them at all. She heard her voice from somewhere far away, her mouth and lips formed the sounds in the proper order. But her mind wasn’t part of the equation.

Craig inched his massive body just slightly closer to Dana’s, and she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Did he really think she didn’t understand what he was doing? Did he really think he could get away with manhandling her when he thought she least expected it? Or was she just being completely paranoid?