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

by Hughes, Jill Elaine

  “Do you have any idea how far along you might be, hon?” Maryam asked, still holding Joanna’s hand.

  She closed her eyes, tried to think backward to the last time she and Harlan had made love—and was stunned when she couldn’t remember. It had been at least a month, maybe even two. Her periods were irregular, so that was no help. And she’d only been married to Harlan for five months, had known him for barely seven. She figured she couldn’t be much more than two or three months along. “I dunno,” she mumbled. “I’m sure I can’t be too far along at this point.”

  Maryam patted her hand. “You’ll need to set up an appointment with OB/GYN, then,” she said. “I’ll make a few calls. I might even be able to get somebody over there in Clinic to see you as soon as they discharge you. An’ I think it goes without saying you’ll be off heavy OR duty for a while. No more double rotating shifts for you, hon. You need your rest.”

  “But—“ Joanna stammered. “Who will supervise the surgical technicians? Who will handle the complex surgeries? We’re short-staffed as it is—Harlan will be furious!“

  Maryam smiled. “Really? You think so? If you ask me, I think he’ll be thrilled. Most expectant fathers are, ya know.”

  Joanna bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about what Harlan might think about the pregnancy. His first wife had been murdered while pregnant, and she knew he still carried plenty of painful memories of that around with him day in and day out. Harlan was a walking time bomb these days. She wasn’t entirely sure her pregnancy would be welcome news.

  “If it’s all the same to you, Maryam, I’d like to just keep this to myself for right now.”

  “What do you mean, hon?”

  “I mean exactly what I said. Nobody is to know about this. Not OB/GYN, not Human Resources, and certainly not Harlan. No one.”

  “But Joanna—“

  “That’s all I have to say on the subject,” Joanna snapped. She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “If anyone asks what happened, just tell them I came down with a bad case of the stomach flu. I’ll worry about the rest.”

  Maryam sighed and shook her head. “Whatever you say, hon. But I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing. Babies are a precious, precious thing, Joanna. Especially at your age. You aren’t exactly a spring chicken, ya know.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she muttered, and stared down at her hands. Tears started spilling down her cheeks.

  And Joanna had the feeling there’d be a lot more where that came from.

  ****

  Harlan was locked in his office, staring blankly at his computer screen. He was supposed to be using this spare hour between scheduled surgeries to check email and catch up on administrative tasks, but he wasn’t getting anything done. His mind was elsewhere.

  And he had plenty on his mind. His crumbling marriage, for one. The fact he’d just made a complete ass of himself in the OR, for another. Not to mention the fact that as much as he hated to admit it, Harlan was finding himself very physically attracted to Starla Berring.

  Very, very physically attracted. To the point he had to excuse himself from postop while carrying an empty surgical tray over his crotch.

  Chief surgeons did not get wood in the OR. And they certainly did not get wood over slutty, trashy women who were not their wives.

  Down, boy, he ordered his disobedient cock. His cock responded by getting harder.

  Harlan loved his wife. He loved her desperately, to the point that he was almost afraid of his feelings for her. To the point that he was pushing her away. To the point that he was checking out other women’s asses—and liking it.

  Harlan’s marriage was falling apart around his ears, and instead of finding a way to fix it, he was getting hard thinking about the office whore.

  Or rather, he was getting hard trying not to think about the office whore. But it seemed that the more he tried to get Starla Berring out of his mind, the more she just took it over completely. He pictured her naked, wondered what it would be like to touch her, touch her intimately, to tread the path that surely dozens—if not hundreds—of men had trod before him.

  Harlan found the very notion of sleeping with a woman like Starla Berring revolting. Or at least, the logical part of him did. The part of him between his legs—not so much.

  Whether or not he acted on them, Harlan felt that even thinking these thoughts amounted to cheating on his wife. His marriage to Joanna was hanging by a thread as it was. It would never survive infidelity. And it seemed no one knew that better than Starla Berring. She was throwing herself at him. The woman had scented blood in the water, and she was moving in for the kill.

  Starla had never seemed to notice Harlan before. Which was really saying something, since the woman would fuck pretty much anything with a penis. The fact that she was noticing him now that his marriage was falling apart just proved that much more how cheap and slutty she really was.

  But no matter how much Harlan’s brain hated the woman’s motives, his body found them sexy. It was some kind of primitive caveman reflex, something that shouldn’t happen in modern society. Something that proved when it came down to brass tacks, even educated, civilized, married men were nothing more than animals in heat.

  Harlan shut down his computer in disgust. There would be no reading of email, no shuffling of paperwork right now. He needed to clear his head. He needed to relax his body.

  He needed to go to his private bathroom and jerk off.

  Harlan was afforded his own private washroom by virtue of his position as Covington Community Hospital’s Chief of Surgery. It was attached to the rear of his office, accessible through a locked door to which only he and a cleaning person had the key. There was a toilet, a sink, a shower stall, a small lounge area with chairs, and a cot for sleeping. Harlan rarely used the washroom retreat; with his busy OR schedule and long list of weekly administrative meetings. He was rarely in his private office at all, let alone had much of a need for a private bathroom.

  Well, he had plenty of need for a private bathroom today.

  Harlan’s cock strained against the thin cotton of his surgical scrubs. His groin and upper thighs throbbed with the heavy need for release. He needed to come more than he’d even needed anything before. If he didn’t get his rocks off right here, right now, his head might explode.

  It wasn’t that long ago when Harlan would have sought out his wife Joanna when his loins needed loosening. They’d spent most of their courtship fucking in the hospital’s elevators and parking garages. But Joanna wasn’t speaking to him right now. Hell, she wasn’t even looking at him right now. It was only a matter of time before the woman served him with divorce papers. He might as well get used to jerking himself off for sex, since it was pretty damn likely that’s all he would be getting for the foreseeable future.

  He took the key to his private washroom from the top drawer of his desk and used it to unlock the heavy wooden door. Harlan’s office was in the oldest wing of the hospital, which dated from the 1920s. He had to step up into the washroom, which was raised slightly above the level of the floor of his main office. The washroom had an Art Deco terrazzo floor that had seen better days, but the heavy wood paneling and marble fixtures looked as good as they had the day they were installed. There was a regular porcelain “john” and an antique Art Deco urinal mounted on the wall at just the perfect height for Harlan’s unique needs of the day.

  He stood before it, loosened the drawstring on his scrubs, and pulled out Mr. Happy. His cock was hard, hot, and already dripping with its sweet and salty juices. Harlan spat on his palms to lube them, and went to town.

  His whole cock began to tingle with warmth, then that warmth began to spread throughout his body. The tension was building faster and faster as Harlan squeezed, slapped, rubbed, and tugged at his cock with one hand, and stroked its sensitive tip with the other. His lips pulled back away from his teeth, his eyes squinted, his breath came harder and faster as he brought himself closer and closer to the edge. Closer and clo
ser, but not quite close enough.

  Harlan could feel his orgasm lying just out of reach. He could smell the musk of his arousal, could taste the salt of his sweat as it formed on his jaw, could feel his essence building up in the tangle of his balls. But try as he might, he just wouldn’t blow.

  Harlan just couldn’t do this by himself. He wasn’t a teenage boy anymore—he was a grown man. If he was going to come, he needed a woman.

  Or if not a woman, at least a reasonable substitute.

  He eyed the shower stall in the far corner of the room. He’d never used it, but he knew the cleaning woman assigned to maintaining his private washroom always kept it well-stocked with fresh linens and toiletries. He opened the shower stall door and saw a wall-mounted dispenser of liquid soap, along with a stack of clean towels and washcloths.

  Excellent. Those would do nicely.

  He stripped naked and left his scrubs and boxer shorts in a neat pile on a nearby chair. He selected a clean towel from the stack and hung it on the heated towel bar, then selected a couple of the thick terry washcloths, inspecting their weave and heft. They were thick and somewhat rough, but not too rough to do the job. Nice.

  He turned on the taps, set the water temperature to the hottest level he could stand. He stepped under the stream, soaked the two washcloths until they were sopping wet. Then he soaped them up with the liquid soap from the dispenser, until they were heavy and slick with lather. Then he formed them into a tube of sorts, and wrapped the tube around his cock.

  Ahh. Now that was just what the doctor ordered.

  The combination of the thick cotton cloth, the hot water, and the slick soap lather wasn’t exactly a woman, but it would do in a pinch. The minute his cock slid inside, Harlan was in heaven.

  He braced himself against the wall with one hand, and used the other to hold the makeshift pussy around his cock while he fucked it.

  He didn’t have to fuck it for long. At last, the orgasm he’d so desperately needed arrived, and his seed spilled on the Art Deco tiles, soon to be washed away by the steamy hot water.

  Harlan leaned against the shower stall wall, gasping for breath. He was exhausted. The orgasm certainly wasn’t the best he’d ever had, but it would sustain him for the time being. It took the edge off, at least. Enough that he wasn’t thinking about Starla Berring naked anymore.

  He glanced at the wall clock, saw that he had about an hour before he was needed back in the OR. He stepped out of the shower, dried off, and collapsed naked onto the cot pushed up against the washroom retreat’s far wall. He was asleep even before his head hit the hospital-issued pillow.

  Eleven

  Maryam Malone sat in her office, her head spinning. It had been one helluva day at Covington Community Hospital. Four dead patients (and two in critical condition) thanks to an IV bag mix-up. A fired contract nurse, and a hysterical nurse-anesthetist who had just gone home in tears over it. Her head surgical nurse was pregnant—knocked flat from severe morning sickness and exhaustion—and therefore out of commission. Between that and the fact her head surgical nurse’s chief-of-surgery husband hadn’t shown up for OR duty at all, Maryam had to cancel all elective surgeries for the rest of the week.

  As if all that weren’t bad enough, after a frantic search, a pair of orderlies had just found Dr. Harlan Wilkinson naked and unconscious in his private office.

  And Maryam had just been assigned to go wake him up.

  “Why me, Lord?” Maryam said aloud. “I think it’s high time for me to retire.”

  The nurse pulled open a supply drawer in her huge desk and took out a batch of smelling salts, a blood-pressure cuff, and some premoistened washcloths. She headed down the hallway toward the elevators, stopping off in the linen-supply room for a couple of hospital gowns. As much as she’d wondered what the handsome and fit Dr. Harlan Wilkinson looked like naked, she decided now probably wasn’t a good time to find out.

  It was a long walk from the main patient-care wing to the Old Wards wing on the opposite end of the hospital campus. Harlan’s private office was tucked away there among narrow, dusty hallways that still smelled faintly of cigarette smoke—a relic of a time not so long ago when doctors did cigarette ads in magazines and the hospital intake clerks asked incoming patients if they wanted smoking or non-smoking rooms.

  Maryam had been a chain smoker for twenty-five years, and had only quit when the hospital banned all smoking on hospital premises—even in break rooms and the parking garage—ten years earlier. Though it had been ten years since she’d had a drag, she always craved one of her beloved old unfiltered Luckies whenever she took a stroll through the Old Wards.

  With the day Maryam was having, she just might be forced to dig up a pack of Luckies from someplace and smoke the entire thing.

  After almost ten minutes of walking, she finally made it to the tiny hall nook that led to Harlan’s Old Wards office. The pair of orderlies that had found him there stood just outside his office door, both sipping cans of Diet Coke and snickering.

  Maryam stopped short in front of them, placed her gnarled hands on her hips. “What’s so goddamn funny?”

  Both orderlies instantly clapped their mouths shut. Maryam might be four-foot-eleven, ancient, and humpbacked—but she was still plenty intimidating. “We, uhhh, we found him,” one of them mumbled. His face was oily and pockmarked with pimples; Maryam figured he couldn’t be more than twenty. “He’s, uhhh, naked.”

  “I know, sonny. That’s what you said on the phone.”

  The other orderly—a tubby kid of eighteen or nineteen who was already balding, resumed snickering. “He’s naked,” he said in thick fratboy-speak. “And he’s got wood.”

  Maryam swore under her breath and shoved her way past Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Sure enough, she found Dr. Harlan Wilkinson sprawled out naked and unconscious on the tiny cot stashed against the far wall of his private washroom-slash-lounge, his huge erect cock pointing due north.

  Maryam held up the two hospital gowns she’d brought along, fully intending to toss them over Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s aroused body. But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not just yet, anyway.

  Covington Community Hospital’s handsome, fit, dashing—if a complete and total asshole—Chief of Surgery lay before her naked, aroused, and unconscious. When would she have another opportunity like this? She might as well admire the goddamn scenery.

  Maryam inched closer to the out-cold surgeon, until she was almost close enough to touch him. She could certainly smell him. Maryam might not have much of a sex life these days, but she’d been around the block enough times to know what sex smelled like. And Maryam’s nose told her that Harlan had got his rocks off in that tiny tiled room very recently, and in a very big way.

  But with whom? Not his wife Joanna, surely—she was still attached to an IV pole in the emergency department. And Harlan Wilkinson, MD didn’t exactly strike her as the type who would play Rosie Palmer And Her Five Sisters on the job. That left only left one possibility in Maryam’s mind.

  Starla Berring?

  “Damn, girl, but you sure work fast,” Maryam clucked aloud as she rummaged in her scrub pocket for the smelling salts. “Not to mention knock ‘em dead. I’ll have to put you in for a raise later this year.”

  With that, Maryam tossed the two hospital gowns over Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s naked, sweaty body. The one that landed over his cock looked like the Big Top for Ringling Bros. She placed one of the cold premoistened towelettes onto Harlan’s forehead and held the smelling salts out under his nose until he began to stir.

  After a moment or two, Harlan’s eyes fluttered open, and he sat bolt upright. He stared at Maryam, went white as a sheet, then red-faced with pure embarrassment. “Wha?”

  “Boy howdy, have you got some explaining to do,” Maryam clucked at him as she wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around his forearm. “An’ not just to me.”

  ****

  Starla Berring just didn’t get it. She’d just finished throwing
herself at Dr. Harlan Wilkinson in postop. She’d even flashed him a little boob. She knew it had turned him on, too—he’d bolted out of postop with the biggest hard-on this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And yet, he’d totally ignored her.

  Nobody ignored Starla Berring. Not where sex was concerned, anyway. Starla had never met a man she couldn’t screw, and she didn’t intend to start now. She had to find a way to get her mojo back.

  Under normal circumstances, Starla would just head back to her most recent conquest for a quickie in order to recharge her batteries. But her most recent conquest was Billy Hartzell, and word around the ward was that he’d managed to help kill a bunch of old geezers in Geriatrics when he mixed up some IV bags. What a dumbass. He’d been fired for it—of course—and he’d lit out of town faster than a drunken polecat.

  So much for Plan B.

  Twelve

  Billy Hartzell drove his battered pickup west on Interstate 40, heading towards Nashville. He was doing almost double the speed limit, but he didn’t care. He needed to put as much space between himself and Statesville, North Carolina as he possibly could.

  Why? He’d killed five people, for starters. Not directly, of course. Not intentionally. All he’d done was grab some oversized IV bags off a dusty shelf, and people had died because of it.

  Talk about some shitty luck.

  Billy felt sick. He felt filthy. He almost wanted to die himself. Not so much because of what had happened on the Geriatrics ward, but because of what Dana would think about him now.

  Like it or not, whether he’d meant it or not, Billy Hartzell had blood on his hands. He was a killer, and Dana would surely hate him for it forever. He wouldn’t be charged with anything criminal since it was an honest mistake—and there was plenty of blame to go around; he was just the fall guy. But that still didn’t change things. He’d have this on his conscience for the rest of his life.

  Billy figured his nursing career would begin and end with his crummy short-term nursing contract at Covington Community Hospital. He’d been a working professional nurse for a grand total of two weeks, and his one little screwup had managed to kill five people. For a short-term nursing contract that mostly involved emptying bedpans, that had to be some kind of record—something that nursing professors would talk about in lectures and textbooks for decades to come.