Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (6 page)

“Watson, I was really hoping to get to know you a little better before we got started this morning,” Dr. Wilkinson said after what seemed like an eternity. “I like to get to know my nurses as people.”

“Well, you already know me in the Biblical sense,” Joanna snapped. “Isn’t that enough?”

He ignored this. “I find it helps improve my working relationship with my lead nurse if I know what makes her tick. But it seems to me that you’d prefer to keep everything strictly business. And that’s fine. I suppose.” He went to gather some files from his desk.

You suppose
? Joanna thought, indignant.
Are you going to give up that easily, Dr. Harlan Wilkinson?
Aren’t you even going to make an effort to get to know me better?
Am I really that uninteresting?

Yes, she
was
that uninteresting. Obviously, the only things the man thought she was good for were holding scalpels and getting fucked over the side of a car.

As Joanna listened to Harlan shuffle through the day’s scheduled surgical cases with the stone-cold, efficient manner of your average executioner, Joanna knew she’d painted herself into a corner.

It was clear Harlan had Joanna right where he wanted her.

“Scalpel, please, Watson,” Harlan’s voice was even and clipped. He didn’t shout or hiss at Joanna in the operating room like he had the day before. Instead, he spoke his orders in a voice so calm and emotionless it was almost eerie. His eyes were completely without expression, his manner cold. Silently, Joanna almost wished the man would start screaming and swearing at her again just so she could reassure herself that he was human. Ever since her botched attempt at reverse psychology that morning, Harlan had become a virtual robot, using his frigid indifference towards her almost like a weapon. The man now seemed no more sexually interested in her than he would your average rock. It infuriated Joanna almost as much as it further inflamed her desire for him.

But she couldn't let him know that. Then he’d have even more power over her than he already did.

Joanna needed to get Harlan’s attention in a way that would thrill and enthrall him, in a way that would throw him off guard and re-ignite his desire for her at the same time.

But how exactly could Joanna make that happen?

She had absolutely no idea.

“Scalpel, Watson!” Dr. Wilkinson’s voice was raw with impatience. “
Now
.”

Joanna felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment as Dr. Wilkinson caught her daydreaming. “Scalpel, Dr. Wilkinson,” she chirped as she palmed the instrument into his gloved hand.

There was a pause. Then—

“Goddamn it!” In a jerking reflex, Dr. Wilkinson flung the scalpel across the operating room and clutched his right hand, sharply sucking in his breath. Shirley Daniels, who was back on nurse-anesthetist duty, gasped.

“Sweet mother of Christ, Joanna,” Harlan Wilkinson swore through gritted teeth. “What in God’s name are you doing?” Harlan’s unmasked forehead was twisting in pain as he clutched his right hand.

To her horror, Joanna saw that blood was seeping from the surgeon’s right palm, soaking through the gloved fingers of his clutching left hand and forming a fast-growing puddle on the floor. Joanna realized that in her desire-fueled distraction, she must have handed Dr. Wilkinson the scalpel blade-first—the worst possible mistake any surgical nurse could make, ever. Nurses were fired—even had their licenses revoked—for less.

Well, she’d gotten his attention, all right. In absolutely the worst way possible.

“Oh, my God, Doctor—“ Joanna stammered. “I—I’m so sorry. I—“

“Be quiet,” Dr. Harlan Wilkinson hissed. He stamped his scrub-bootied foot onto a button embedded in the floor of the operating room that controlled an emergency intercom. “Code 15 in Operating Room Two. Code 15 in Operating Room Two. Send a relief team immediately.”

Code 15.

At Covington Community Hospital, “Code 15” was the alert for “disabled surgeon”. In a single careless moment, all of Joanna’s years of nursing training and experience failed her, and she had rendered Dr. Harlan Wilkinson disabled.

And all because she was desperate for more sex.

Joanna felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. If the cut on Harlan’s palm was deep enough, if it had severed a muscle, or even worse, a nerve—he might never operate on anyone again.

And it would be
her
fault.

“You’re lucky this is routine elective surgery, Joanna,” Harlan growled at her, his voice riddled with contempt. “If this had been the open-heart surgery scheduled for later today, you very well could have helped kill the patient with what you just did. Looks like all you managed to do this time around is destroy my career.” Harlan held his bleeding right hand out away from the patient, a middle-aged woman seeking elective treatment for a troublesome but not life-threatening gall bladder problem. “Clamp the incision until the relief team gets here, Watson.
If
you think you can handle that.”
Joanna obeyed, but it was all she could do to keep the surgical clamps steady. She was shaking all over. Harlan’s rage-filled eyes stared at her from his spot across the operating table from her—a spot he was required by law to occupy, bleeding profusely or not—until the relief team arrived. Every moment that those eyes bore into her felt like a century. Joanna feared it would never end.

At long last, a bewildered third-year surgical resident and two young nurses appeared in the OR, already scrubbed and masked. “I’m injured,” Dr. Wilkinson barked at them. “Take over. It’s a standard gallbladder removal, no complications other than the fact my fucking right hand is in ribbons. Plus, the whole surgical area is contaminated now. You’ll need to re-sterilize everything and re-dress the surgery site.”

With that, Harlan stomped out of the OR, almost slipping on the trail of blood left by his shredded right palm.

As soon as the new surgical team was in place, Joanna followed Harlan out of the OR into the scrub room, dreading what might happen next.

****

Well, that was unexpected
, Shirley Daniels thought to herself as she watched Dr. Harlan Wilkinson drag himself from the ER, bleeding like a stuck pig. She’d never seen anything like it in her entire career. Talk about cutting a man down a notch or two. Harlan had been cut down more than a notch—he’d been
cut down
, literally.

All of a sudden, the man didn’t seem quite so McDreamy after all.

It was all Shirley could do to keep from laughing while she continued on with the operation under the new surgical team. To think—just yesterday, the sight and sound of Dr. Harlan Wilkinson had been enough to make her panties swampy. Now the man just made her mad.

What kind of crackpot surgeon lets his hand get sliced to ribbons on the job?

Maybe the kind of surgeon who has his mind on things other than the task at hand.

Namely, hot sex with his lead surgical nurse.

Shirley shook her head and chuckled despite herself as she manually adjusted one of the dials on the anesthesia machine.
Obviously, those two are in each other’s pants
, she thought. And in all likelihood, it would end up with the both of them getting fired.

At one level, Shirley was jealous. Even if she thought Dr. Harlan Wilkinson was a crass, obnoxious jerk who made everyone who worked with him in the OR miserable, she still would have liked the opportunity to see what the man carried around in his pants. The fact that the beautiful and sensual Joanna Watson beat her to it wasn’t exactly surprising, either—but she still would have liked to have had the
opportunity
to try for it herself. Now that the man was probably permanently out of commission as far as performing surgery was concerned, Shirley wouldn’t even have that. It was only a matter of time before he had to pull up stakes and head back north to Boston or New York or whatever Yankee city he was from, head dragging and tail between his legs.

Or more accurately,
cock
dragging between his legs. Because it was pretty obvious to Shirley that’s what got him into this mess in the first place. And she’d never even had the chance to get her hands on that cock herself.

Now that just wasn’t fair, damn it.

Shirley wasn’t usually the jealous type, but her roll in the hay with Jason the Super-Hot Fratboy last night had exposed a side of herself she thought had been dead for a long time—her old
sorority girl
side.

And as anyone who’s met a sorority girl or two knows, they are nothing if not vengeful, petty, and most of all,
competitive.

As Shirley Daniels slowly turned down the amount of sodium pentothal flowing into the veins of the middle-aged woman lying on the operating table, she set about mentally devising a plan to get back at Joanna Watson for mucking things up for her in the bedroom department.

And Shirley thought she might as well start with Dr. Grenoway, the green third-year surgical resident who had just taken over for Dr. Wilkinson. He was young, spry—and if the uptight, corncob-assed way he strutted around the hospital was any example—in desperate need of a good lay.

And the new-and-improved Shirley Daniels could take care of that in a flash.

If Shirley had her way, from now on
she
would be known as the beautiful, sensual, and most fuckable nurse around here—not Joanna Watson. No siree.

****

Joanna held her breath as she stepped into the scrub room. Harlan was leaning over the scrub trough, his back to her as he washed and re-washed his right hand. The water ran red from his wound. Joanna’s nursing skills told her the cut must be deep for it to still be bleeding so heavily.

Without a word, she went to the emergency first aid kit on the wall and took out sterile gauze pads and wrappings.

“Let me dress your wound for you, Doctor,” she said, her voice shaking so much she could barely get the words out.

Harlan shut off the scrub taps with his left elbow and turned to face her. His face was blank, expressionless, his eyes vacant and dim. He held out his palm for her to see.

The cut went all the way to the bone.

“Don’t bother, Watson. I’ll need stitches, and you aren’t qualified to do them on a palm cut this deep. Neither am I, actually. I’ll need a hand surgeon to do it.”

“We don’t have any hand surgeons on staff at Covington, Doctor,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I know.” Dr. Harlan Wilkinson looked at the floor. The impact the injury might have on his career already weighed heavily on him, she could see that. In a few short minutes his physical presence had diminished from a powerful, virile surgeon to that of a frightened boy. Joanna could see the fear in his eyes as he stared at the deep, jagged incision in the middle of his otherwise perfect surgeon’s hand.

Joanna took a deep breath and strengthened her resolve. She would have to help him, somehow. Helping him to survive his career-threatening injury was clearly the only avenue she had left inside Harlan’s heart of stone, but she knew that after what she’d done, there was almost no chance at all he’d ever let her get anywhere close to his heart.

Still, she had to try. Even as he stood slump-shouldered in his injured, frightened state, both hands trembling, she felt an attraction to his body, mind and soul that had just as much intensity as it had before—possibly even more so. Joanna could sense his weakness and vulnerability, and it made her pulse skitter with a strange mixture of compassion, anxiety, and excitement.

“Dr. Wilkinson, the nearest hand surgeon is in Raleigh-Durham, at the University of North Carolina Medical Center. If you’ll let to dress your wound for the trip, I’ll drive you there myself. It’s the least I can do after what happened.”

Harlan let out a heavy sigh, and slowly closed his eyes. “I would appreciate that, Joanna,” he said. She took his wounded hand in her own, and found it cold and clammy. Still, even the touch of his damp, wounded hand against her still-gloved ones was enough to send a bolt of electricity all the way through her body.

A bolt of electricity that came to rest squarely between her legs, and stayed there. That moist heat slowly spread its radiating warmth out to the rest of her body as she dabbed antiseptic cream on Harlan’s grievous wound. She applied pressure bandages, and finally wrapped his hand several times over with sterile gauze. She snipped the end of the roller bandage with hook scissors and secured the loose end with tape. Then she gently lowered Harlan’s arm to his side, bending it at the elbow so his bandaged hand pointed towards the ceiling.

“You’ll need to keep your hand elevated like this to help slow any additional bleeding,” Joanna said, feeling stupid. Surely as a master surgeon, Harlan already knew that. But she had to keep talking, to keep saying
something
—or else she’d fall apart on the spot. “But it does look like you’re finally getting some clotting, and the pressure bandages should also help. Do you feel lightheaded at all?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” Joanna asked. “You lost quite a bit of blood in there. You might even need a transfusion—“

“I’m fine.” Harlan’s gruff voice cut her off. “Just get me the hell out of here.”