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

Copyright

Hot Medicine, Sex in a Southern City, and Prescription for Passion

All rights reserved for all titles. Copyright 2014 Jill Elaine Hughes
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of these publications may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the Author. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher.
These books are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Table of Contents

Hot Medicine

Sex in a Southern City

Prescription for Passion

Hot Medicine

“You’ll be working another double-shift tonight,” Joanna Watson’s boss growled at her from the other side of the nurse’s station. “Lindsay’s still out with the flu, plus the new chief surgeon is pulling
triple
time in the operating room—triple, as in working twenty-four hours
straight.
And we’ve only got half the nurses we need on staff as it is.”

Joanna Watson knitted her perfectly arched strawberry-blonde brows together. “Damn it,” she muttered. Yet another sleepless night in the OR was the last thing she needed.

What Joanna needed more than anything right now was a nap.

“Joanna? Did you hear what I just said?” Maryam Malone, Covington Community Hospital’s Surgery and Recovery department’s sixtysomething head nurse, tapped Joanna on the shoulder with a ballpoint pen that advertised the newest erectile-dysfunction drug. Maryam had a whole collection of erectile-dysfunction drug pens—she accumulated them on her desk as a homage to her late husband, who had died of a heart attack last year immediately following a Viagra-fueled marathon lovemaking session. Joanna had to shake her head rapidly to clear it of all the sexually suggestive brand names (Levitra, Viagra, Cialis) the pen triggered in her weary brain. It had been so long since Joanna had had sex, she could scarcely remember what an erect penis—chemically induced or otherwise—looked like.

“Joanna?” Maryam asked. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I am. I’m sorry—I guess I’m just a little irritated is all.”

“Why?”

“I worked my butt off for Dr. Turnblatt for three straight months before he retired. I
earned
this time off from the OR, Maryam. Joe Middleton promised it to me. And now you’re expecting me to go right back in there, without even a
single day
off? It’s not fair!”

“Well,
life’s
not fair, sweetie,” Maryam clucked. “But don’t worry. Given the situation, I got good old Mr. Middleton to approve double-overtime pay for you instead of the usual time-and-a-half. That’s the best I can do until Lindsay gets over the flu. Oh, and I should warn you. The new guy is a real jerk. Dr. Wilkinson is a taskmaster, an S.O.B, and an evil criminal mastermind all rolled into one.”

Joanna chuckled and finished signing off on some medical supply requisitions. “I’m sure he’s not as bad as all that.”

Maryam laughed. “That’s easy for you to say. You haven’t met him yet. I’ve been dealing with him for the past three days, and I’ve got to tell you Joanna, the guy’s got about as much charisma as Darth Vader on crack.”

Joanna started grinding her teeth. A raging, supermacho surgeon making her life miserable in the OR was the last thing she needed after the hellish three months she’d just spent stroking Dr. Turnblatt’s (thankfully) now-retired ego. As if that weren’t bad enough, her divorce had just been made final a month prior to that.

A divorce that was a long time in coming. She’d spent almost three years legally separated from her petty ex-husband while they bickered in court over their marital assets. In the end, most of the marital assets went to pay legal bills, leaving Joanna with little besides the equity in her modest condo, her nursing job, and what little was left of her dignity.

“All right,” Joanna finally sighed, surrendering to her fate. “I’ll consider myself forewarned. I’ll take the shift on one condition.”

Maryam’s nostrils flared. “What’s that?”

“Give me half an hour to take a nap, and another half-hour to get some dinner. I’ll just go down to the cafeteria lounge for a sandwich or something. I won’t be long.”

“All right, deal. But hurry up about it.”

Joanna sighed, finished filing her paperwork, and started down the hall towards the elevators.

Joanna’s sturdy nursing shoes squeaked on the linoleum.
Viagra. Cialis. Levitra. Levitra. Viagra. Cialis.
Brand names from dozens of commercials featuring ridiculously sexy middle-aged men rang out in her brain like church bells with every step she took. Why couldn’t she get all those annoying drugs out of her mind? It’s not like she would ever need to take them herself. It’s not like anyone had taken them for the purpose of satisfying
her
, either. She’d had no sex life to speak of for the past three years.

She’d had no sex life to speak of long before her divorce was even a consideration, in fact. Even during their ten-year marriage, Bob (her dull bean-counter of an ex-husband) had always been too proud to admit that he was exactly the kind of man the drug companies had in mind when they invented Viagra. Bob had spent more of their marriage trying in vain to get his dick up than he had doing anything else.

Joanna shook her head hard, trying to clear it of the painful memories. But try as she might, she just couldn’t get sex off her mind.
What’s wrong with me
? she thought.
It’s probably just the exhaustion
.
Either that or I’ve been watching too many Viagra commericals.

Joanna headed for the elevators. She’d catch a ride to the lower-level cafeteria on one of them, grab a sandwich and a coffee for two bucks, and hopefully grab a quick nap in the nurse’s lounge before reporting for duty in the dreaded Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s operating room. Joanna wasn’t nervous or apprehensive at meeting the newest SOB-surgeon on the block—she’d met dozens of aggressive, Type-A physicians in her career—she was just annoyed. Annoyed, and damn tired. A nice, quiet break was all she needed.

A nice, quiet break, that’s all.

But a nice, quiet break wasn’t exactly what was in store for her. Not by a long shot.

Joanna stepped into the elevator when it arrived on her floor. She pressed the “DOOR CLOSE” button several times, trying in vain to get the elevator moving. But the old contraption, designed in the 1950s for ferrying slow-moving gurneys and wheelchairs, wasn’t cooperating.

“Damn it,” she mumbled under her breath, mashing the “DOOR CLOSE” button again. At last, the squeaky car doors began to shut.

“HOLD THAT GODDAMN THING! HOLD IT!” A booming male voice echoed into the elevator car from somewhere down the hall. A deep, gravelly, slightly hoarse male voice.

A voice that for some unknown reason, gave Joanna pause.

Her finger floated involuntarily to the “DOOR OPEN” button. She almost didn’t notice it happening until the last possible second, when the doors were nearly shut.

“DID YOU HEAR ME?” the voice thundered. “
Hold
it!”

Joanna pressed the “DOOR OPEN” button without exactly knowing why. She wanted nothing more than to get to the basement for her coffee break, but something in the unseen man’s voice made her waver.

The elevator doors glided open again. A tall, scowling man stood on the other side of them.

A tall, scowling, rumpled, sweaty, and very
attractive
man. A man that Joanna hadn’t seen before. A man wearing dirty scrubs, a vicious frown, and at least three-days’ growth of stubby beard that did nothing to deter from his natural good looks.

“Are you hard of hearing?” the man growled at her. “I asked you to
hold
this goddamn elevator.”

Joanna didn’t respond for nearly thirty seconds. She set her jaw and returned the man’s steely, aquamarine-eyed gaze. As a seasoned hospital nurse, she was accustomed to difficult, short-tempered people. She was used to rude, crude, obnoxious behavior by both patients
and
doctors. What she was
not
used to was that rude, crude behavior emanating from a man who was so ruggedly handsome that it made the pit of her stomach quaver.

“Sorry, I thought I
was
holding it for you,” was Joanna’s curt reply.

The scowling man blinked twice. He held the elevator doors open with his hands. Joanna noticed that unlike the rest of his unkempt, rugged self, both his hands were immaculately manicured, the skin moisturized, the fingers long and nimble. She’d seen hands like that often enough to know exactly what they were used for.

They were a surgeon’s hands.

Joanna stepped to the rear of the elevator and leaned against its cool stainless-steel wall. The scowling surgeon stepped inside the car without another word. He stared straight ahead, and did nothing more to acknowledge Joanna’s presence.

Joanna gazed at their reflection in the elevator’s mirrored doors as the car jerked and vibrated its way down towards the hospital basement. The scowling surgeon’s jaw tensed in a series of nervous tics. His feet shuffled back and forth on the metal floor of the elevator car. He checked his watch.

“Goddamn it, this had got to be the slowest fucking elevator in the entire state of North Carolina,” he hissed just as the elevator car lurched to a sudden stop that sent Joanna tumbling to the floor. The man lost his balance for the slightest moment, but then righted himself against the wall. He stared down at Joanna on the floor, but said nothing.

It took her a moment to collect her wits from the fall, but she soon gathered her composure and stared back up at this man, who had to be one of the rudest of all the rude surgeons that she’d ever encountered in her fifteen years as a nurse. She knew his type, all right. He was acid, Type-A, abrasive-SOB-surgeon all the way. Since she hadn’t seen him anywhere around before, Joanna hoped against hope that Mr. Personality here was one of the hospital’s outpatient surgeons—the ones who did run-of-the-mill tummy tucks for the local socialites and stomach stapling jobs for the hopelessly obese—instead of the heavy-duty inpatient procedures she usually assisted on. God knew she didn’t want to get stuck in the OR with this chump. Whoever this man was, he obviously didn’t belong in her department. He was probably just lost.

At least, she
hoped
he was lost.

Joanna rubbed her bruised tailbone. As a proper North Carolina lady, Joanna expected to be treated with a certain level of courtesy from men. “Aren’t you going to help me up, Doctor?”

Mr. Personality frowned down at her. “Why? You don’t look injured to me.”

“Some would call it gentlemanly courtesy to help a lady up after she falls.”

He scoffed. “Not where I come from. Where I come from, it’s every man for himself.”

Offended, Joanna bit her tongue, and pulled herself upright without comment.

“Goddamn it,” Mr. Personality said again as he banged on the elevator doors. Joanna noted the hint of a Northern city accent. She couldn’t place which one—New York, or maybe Boston. “Looks like this goddamn thing is stuck.”

Joanna sighed and rolled her eyes. “It certainly looks that way, sir. Too bad I’m stuck in here with you.” She tried to make her voice sound as nasty as his, but her rolling, native-Carolina accent just made her insult seem overly polite.

“I’ll just forget I heard that,” Mr. Personality seethed just as his beeper went off. He pulled it off his waistband, read the return phone number, and exclaimed, “Fuck!”

“I’d appreciate it if you watch your language, Doctor,” Joanna said, her voice tight and even. “This is a hospital, not a roadside bar.”

“Pardon me, miss, but I’ll swear as much as I fucking feel like swearing when I’m stuck in a goddamn elevator. I’m getting paged by the trauma team and I can’t return the page because I’m stuck in here without a phone.”

Joanna reached into the left pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a cell phone, which she handed to Mr. Personality. He snatched it out of her hands without a word.

“You’re welcome,” she hissed. He ignored her and dialed the phone.

Joanna folded her arms and glared at Mr. Personality while he waited for someone in Trauma to answer his call. After a moment, someone did.

“Yeah, this is Dr. Harlan Wilkinson here, returning a page?”

Joanna felt all the blood drain from her face. Dr. Harlan Wilkinson? Mr. Personality was
Dr. Harlan Wilkinson?

As in, the hospital’s new head of surgery?

Oh, shit.

“Sorry, I can’t get down there right now,” Dr. Wilkinson barked into her phone. “I’m stuck in the goddamn elevator with some idiot nurse.”

At this, Joanna gritted her teeth and shot Dr. Wilkinson the most vicious look she could manage. He stared back, then looked her up and down. She felt her skin prickle under his gaze.

“Yeah, well, you’ll just have to have one of the residents handle it until I can get out of this tin can,” Dr. Wilkinson shouted into the phone. “Send the goddamn maintenance people up here to get me out of this thing, why don’t you?”

Dr. Wilkinson snapped Joanna’s cell phone shut and passed it back to her as if it were contaminated with flesh-eating bacteria. She slipped it back into the hip pocket of her scrubs. As she did, she noticed that for some strange reason, her groin had started to feel a little warm.

“For your information, Dr. Wilkinson, I am not an idiot,” Joanna heard herself say.

Dr. Wilkinson raised his eyebrows, but didn’t respond.

“I am a trained, highly experienced nurse. A
surgical
nurse.”

Dr. Wilkinson’s eyebrows lowered. Joanna noticed he had a deep furrow between them, a furrow that she couldn’t help staring at. “Oh?” he asked.

“I have been assigned to assist you in your surgical procedures this evening,” she retorted. “
After
I’ve had my coffee break, that is.”

Dr. Wilkinson absently rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “You can forget about that,” he muttered. “I don’t believe in coffee breaks.”

Joanna did a double-take. “I’ll have you know that I am fully entitled to take this break. I’ve been working double shifts every day for the past three weeks without a single day off. I’ve already worked an eight-hour shift today in Recovery straight through without a lunch hour, plus Head Nurse Malone authorized it since I wasn’t even supposed to be working second shift at all today—“

“You don’t work for Head Nurse Malone,” Dr. Wilkinson said matter-of-factly.

The
nerve
of this guy, telling her who she did and did not work for! She’d teach Mr. Personality here a thing or two. Joanna unfolded her arms and stamped her foot. “Yes, I do. She’s the head nurse in my department, and—“

“You work for me.
Only
for me. You’re Joanna Watson, aren’t you?”

Joanna blinked. “How did you know?”

A slow smile spread across Dr. Wilkinson’s stubbled face. “I just read your ID badge.”

Joanna felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment. “Oh. Right.”

“When the hospital hired me to take over for Dr. Turnblatt, one of the terms I worked into my contract was that I’d be guaranteed to have the best surgical nurses on staff here at my disposal whenever I wanted them, day or night—and that I’d have absolute control over their scheduling and assignments. And my sources tell me that the best surgical nurse on staff here at Covington Community Hospital is, hands-down, Joanna Watson. Apparently, that’s you.”

At this, Joanna was flattered, but she wasn’t about to show it. Not to Mr. Personality here. She couldn’t allow him that satisfaction. “That doesn’t mean I
work
for you. I report to the head nurse,
not
to you—“

“You do now. You’ll be getting a memo on that sometime tomorrow. Per the terms of my contract, you belong to me.”

Joanna’s jaw dropped into her chin with a painful
thud
. “But—“

Dr. Wilkinson put up his well-manicured hand to cut her off. “I need you for my next scheduled surgery. That’s in thirty minutes. It’s a trauma case, a twenty-year-old college kid with a very nasty compound femur fracture he got jumping off the roof of his frat house over at Hunton College. I’m doing it myself because the nearest orthopaedist is two hours away in Durham. It’ll take a good couple hours of OR time to stabilize this kid, since he’s already lost a lot of blood, and has alcohol poisoning to boot. As soon as maintenance gets us out of this goddamn elevator, Watson, I am going down to the ER to assess this case, and while I am doing that, you are to report straight back up to the Surgery floor to scrub up for the job. You belong to
me
for the rest of your shift, and you’ll do what
I
say. Got it?”

Joanna sucked in a deep, heavy breath and blew it out. It was all she could do to keep herself from throttling him. What a bastard.

She finally lowered her gaze to the floor of the elevator and gave the doctor a single nod.

“Good.”

Joanna summoned the courage to look Dr Wilkinson straight in the eye—and as she did, she felt her crotch go even warmer. “So, what do we do if they can’t get us out of the elevator?” she asked.

Dr. Wilkinson shrugged. “Well, then I suppose we’d be screwed,” he said, then looked Joanna up and down once more. “I’ve gotta be honest, Ms. Watson. You aren’t exactly how I pictured you when the administration described your qualifications.”

Joanna raised one eyebrow. “And how, pray tell,
did
you picture me?”

Dr. Wilkinson looked Joanna up and down yet again—slower this time. “I pictured you as middle-aged, frumpy, overweight, and with a blue-dyed beehive hairdo.”

Joanna laughed. “You just described my boss, Maryam Malone.”

A slow smile tugged at one corner of the surgeon’s mouth. “Well, that’s amusing,” he said. “Though in my experience, most good OR nurses look just like that. I haven’t run into a decent OR nurse under the age of forty-five in, well, never. Let alone one as young and attractive as you are.”

Joanna blushed to her eardrums. “Well, thank you for the compliment,” she said. “At least I
think
it’s a compliment. For all I know, you’re insulting me for not having enough experience.”

“I doubt you’d have such a stellar reputation if you lacked experience,” the surgeon replied, his eyes sparkling. “Though you don’t exactly look like someone who’s tough enough to work for twenty-four hours straight on your feet in the OR.” He looked up and down her body again, and this time, every pore of Joanna’s skin felt as if he were caressing it under his gaze. “You’re awfully petite for OR work, Watson. And you look pretty damn good for someone who claims to be overworked and exhausted.” Dr. Wilkinson shifted his weight, leaned back against the elevator’s cold steel wall. “Hell, if this is how you look on a bad day, I’d love to catch you on a good one sometime.”

Joanna’s breath caught. Was this man coming on to her? It certainly seemed that way.

Several awkward minutes passed. There was a harsh, metallic grinding noise from somewhere high above. The elevator jerked sharply again, then dropped further and stopped short, sending Joanna toppling forward into Dr. Wilkinson’s arms.

Then the lights went out.