Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (41 page)

Starla just kept staring at the floor. She fiddled with her hands, rocked back and forth on the thick soles of her Nurse Mates, and waited for Maryam’s final instructions.

“Well, I guess I’ve wasted enough of your time, hon,” the older nurse finally said. “You best be getting down to the OR. Bunion operation. I know how much you love those.” She gave a little fake laugh, a futile attempt to break the tension.

“Yeah, right.” Starla gave a little fake laugh of her own, and headed off towards the operating suite. She gritted her teeth and cringed every step of the way.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. It was all Starla could do to keep from throwing up.

Six

Dana Johnson stood at the scrub trough, preparing to go into the OR for the third time that afternoon. As nurse-anesthetist, she technically wasn’t required to scrub in along with the surgeons and nurses, but she always did it anyway, just to be on the safe side. You could never predict what might happen. Dana had read an anecdote back in nursing school about a nurse-anesthetist on a MASH unit in Vietnam taking over surgery duties for the attending when he got hit with a piece of shrapnel during an air assault. Not that there were a lot of air assaults going on in tranquil little Statesville, North Carolina. But you could never be too sure.

Especially these days. Lately it seemed that every time Dana stepped into the OR, she was stepping into a war zone. And she’d only been on the job for a couple of days. She wondered if she was entitled to combat pay.

Dana had worked with plenty of hard-edged, Type-A surgeons in her six years of working as a nurse-anesthetist. Even though she’d mostly worked in small-town hospitals that didn’t tend to have big-city doctors (with their big-city egos to match) on staff, she knew from experience that almost all surgeons had massive God complexes and the manners of grizzly bears in heat. It just went with the territory. Still, Dr. Harlan Wilkinson was in a class by himself. Never in all her years in this business had Dana ever encountered anyone so abrasive. And considering some of the arrogant-asshole doctors she’d worked with over the years, that was really saying something. Making matters worse, there were obviously some serious problems going on between Dr. Wilkinson and his wife, Joanna Watson-Wilkinson, though nobody on staff would discuss it with her.

Ha. Dana might the new kid on the block, but she wasn’t stupid. It was obvious those two were about to get a divorce. That is, if they didn’t kill each other first. And Dana didn’t see why everyone else on staff had to suffer because of it. It was only a matter of time before one of their OR arguments erupted into something major and a patient ended up getting hurt by it. Or even worse, dead. And Dana wanted no part in that.

On the inside, Dana was furious and ready to tear Dr. Wilkinson limb from limb. But on the outside, Dana was just a timid, soft-spoken little mouse. She wanted to knock some sense into Joanna, too. That woman really needed to buy a clue when it came to how much of a jerk her husband was. But no matter what she might feel on the inside, Dana wasn’t about to show it on the outside. It just wasn’t in her nature. Dana Johnson was a super-demure, super-reserved, super-virginal Southern belle. She kept things to herself whenever and wherever possible, and preferred to be as far away from the center of attention as she could. Which meant that nobody ever knew what she really thought of anyone.

Which was really just as well, because most of the time Dana didn’t even know what she thought of herself.

Dana was twenty-six years old, petite, brunette, and beautiful. She was also a virgin.

And Dana really, really hated the fact that she was a twenty-six-year-old virgin.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had plenty of opportunities. She’d just never quite known what to do with all those opportunities. Men had been throwing themselves at her since her breasts first came in when she was a sophomore in high school. But she’d turned every last one of them down—and not just for sex. For dates, too. For just about anything they offered her, in fact. Dana Johnson, the shy, petite, elflike woman who was as beautiful as any high-fashion model or Hollywood actress, was a pure and untouched as the virgin snow. She’d never been on a date in her life. She’d never even so much as held hands with a man, unless you counted Jimmy Toohey, the boy who had lived across the street from her childhood home in Savannah. She’d held hands with him once when they were both eleven years old, and then all the girls at school told her it meant she had cooties. So she didn’t think that counted.

Something else had happened to Dana. Something that didn’t count, either. But she preferred not even to think about that unless she had to.

Dana had learned to live with her virginity. She accepted it for what it was, the same way people learned to accept a birthmark or a scar. But just because she’d grown to accept it didn’t mean she had to like it. Being a twenty-six-year-old virgin was a conscious choice. Dana wasn’t so naïve as to not understand that. But it was a choice she’d grown to regret.

Dana’s conservative Southern Baptist family had raised her to “save herself for marriage.” Which was all well and good if you married at eighteen or nineteen, like women of her grandparents’ generation had. But even the most traditional Southern belles didn’t usually find themselves still single at age twenty-six. The whole no-sex-til-marriage thing didn’t really work in the real world now that most professional people didn’t marry until they were in their thirties.

Dana had studied enough about human sexuality back in nursing school to know that abstinence just didn’t work in the long run. It was unnatural. Even she knew that.

Dana knew that she really needed to have sex. The only problem was, she didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about it. She knew nothing about dating. She didn’t know how to flirt. She’d always avoided both like the plague, mostly because she was afraid of men. Literally. Aside from being naturally shy and demure, she’d had a very bad experience with an older man when she was but a mere girl of fourteen, and had never been the same since.

It had happened when she’d stayed with her Grandma Rose in Charleston one summer. Her grandmother was a grand old dame of the South, and lived in her family’s ancestral antebellum home in historic downtown Charleston. The sweeping wood-and-stucco house was huge, and painted apricot, with a double-decker verandah and plenty of hanging Spanish moss. Dana was fresh out of eighth grade, about to start her first year of high school. Even though she was already fourteen, she hadn’t really hit puberty yet—her breasts were still tiny buds, her hips narrow and gangly like a boy’s. But she was still beautiful in a shy nymphet kind of way—to the point that her mother had warned her to “watch out for those evil Carolina boys” before she left Savannah.

Dana hadn’t exactly known what her mother had meant by that remark. She still thought boys were just random annoyances with cooties. How little she’d really understood them! She had no inkling whatsoever that most boys her age were chock-full of hormones and willing to do just about anything to get inside a naïve young girl’s panties. It was exactly the reason her mother had been so worried about her.

But neither her mother nor Dana herself could have predicted that Dana’s precious Southern Belle purity would almost be snatched away by a man more than thirty years her senior.

Grandma Rose’s favorite pastime was to play bridge and sip mint-flavored sweet tea out on the double-decker verandah. She spent every fair evening out on the top verandah sitting at the card table she always kept set up outside the French doors that led into the upstairs sitting room, or “summer parlor.” Most of Grandma Rose’s bridge partners were little old Southern ladies like herself, but one of them—and by far her favorite—was Captain Masters.

Captain Masters wasn’t an actual captain. Captain was his given name. He’d gotten it thanks to the fact that his father had spent some time in the Navy, though he’d been an enlisted man and never served long enough to rank higher than midshipman. But even if his name didn’t quite match his pedigree, Captain Masters knew how to play the part. He was every bit the dashing Southern gentleman, with a smattering of exotic world traveler mixed in, though nobody seemed to know exactly where or when he had traveled—or if he had ever been away from American shores at all. Captain Masters was secretive and mysterious, which added to his allure. And he liked it that way.

Grandma Rose never enforced a bedtime or curfew for Dana when she visited, which was one of the reasons she always looked forward to her summers in Grandma Rose’s sprawling mansion. At Grandma Rose’s, Dana got to watch Johnny Carson and pop Jiffy Pop popcorn at eleven o’clock at night on the stove without supervision. Sometimes she even wandered the nighttime streets of downtown Charleston alone. As long as Grandma Rose found Dana tucked safely in bed in the morning when she woke up at six a.m., Dana would never get into trouble.

Or so she thought. What Dana didn’t understand at the time was, there were plenty of ways for a fourteen-year-old girl to get into trouble that didn’t involve a scolding from Grandma Rose.

It was rumored around town that Captain Masters and Grandma Rose were having an affair despite the fact he was at least twenty-five years her junior—and neither Captain nor Grandma Rose ever did or said anything to dispute those rumors. In fact, they seemed to enjoy being the center of such scandalous attention. Almost every single evening that summer, Captain Masters and Grandma Rose sat at the card table she always kept out on her verandah and played two-handed pinochle, or four-or six-handed bridge if they could get enough other players. They would sit and play cards for hours, sipping mint juleps and gossiping. They never retired before one or two in the morning, and though they tried to be discreet about it, they always retired to Grandma Rose’s palatial pink bedroom together. Dana was far too naïve to know what they might be doing in there at two in the morning, of course. In her innocence she thought that maybe they just got too cold from the night air and decided to move their bridge game indoors.

After Dana had been staying at Grandma Rose’s for about a month that summer, her grandmother suddenly fell ill. She collapsed one night while playing pinochle and fell over backwards, metal folding chair and all, until she landed flat on her back on the whitewashed verandah floor. It was a quiet evening in the house that night, with only Captain Masters visiting. Dana was in the upstairs sitting room watching Johnny Carson and eating her nightly bowl of Jiffy Pop when Captain Masters stormed into the room.

“Dana, sweet girl child, your grandmammy’s turned up ill,” Captain Masters drawled. “Might could ye go grab her a glass of ice water from the kitchen?”

“Sure,” Dana had replied. But no sooner did she get up and head for her bedroom door, Captain blocked her path. He stared at her, his ice-blue eyes scanning her gangly adolescent body up and down. He sidled up to her, closing the space between them to mere inches. She could hear his rapid breathing, could smell the sour mix of mint julep and stale pretzels on his breath. He reached out and touched her on the cheek.

“An’ bring me another mint julep from downstairs while yer at it,” he said, his index finger stroking back and forth on her cheek, back and forth, making a hot little trail on her damp, sweaty skin (Grandma Rose didn’t believe in air conditioning, even on the hottest of hot Charleston summer nights.) “Your grandmammy keeps it in a pitcher in the icebox,” he drawled, his voice deepening with criminal intent and desire. “Hurry up now, gal, time’s a-wastin’.”

“Is Grandma Rose okay?” Dana asked. She’d caught sight of her unconscious grandmother sprawled over backwards on the verandah by then. Dana saw her through the open French doors just to the left of Captain Masters’ shoulder. Her grandmother’s droopy gray eyes were rolled way back into her head, and a line of drool ran down one side of her mouth. But as soon as Captain knew Dana could see what had happened out on the verandah, he grabbed her, shoved her against the wall, and kissed her hard on the lips.

Dana misread his intentions, of course. She just thought he was upset that Grandma Rose had fainted. After all, in the South it wasn’t at all unusual for adults to kiss children goodnight—or good morning—full on the mouth. Of course Captain Masters wasn’t kissing her goodnight—or good morning—but naïve little Dana just thought that seeing Grandma Rose keel over backwards made him forget what time of day it was. Still, a strange feeling deep in the pit of her stomach told her something was wrong.

Dana finally squirmed out of Captain’s grasp and headed downstairs to the kitchen. She poured a glass of ice water for her grandmother, and added a lemon wedge from the bowl that her grandmother always kept in the top shelf of the refrigerator door. She poured a highball of mint julep for Captain Masters from the pitcher, then carried both upstairs. When she made it back to the upstairs sitting room, Dana looked through the open French doors and saw Captain crouched over Grandma Rose’s unconscious body on the floor of the verandah. At first glance she thought that Captain was trying to revive her, but when she took a few steps closer, she saw him trying to stuff a silk handkerchief down her throat with one hand, while holding Grandma Rose’s nostrils shut with the other.

Dana knew
that
wasn’t right. In shock, she dropped both glasses. They shattered on the cherry parquet floor. She ran down the hall to Grandma Rose’s bedroom, and dialed 911 on the pink Princess phone. The police and ambulance were there in three minutes, and the two beat cops assigned to the call saw Captain Masters trying to suffocate Grandma Rose from the street. One of the cops climbed the garden trellis up to the second-story verandah and arrested Captain Masters on the spot. The paramedics worked to revive Grandma Rose while the cops dragged Captain away, kicking and screaming. Only then did Dana fully grasp what Captain Masters had tried to do to her grandmother—and to her. Captain Masters had tried to take advantage of the both of them. And in a way, he had succeeded both times.

As she watched the authorities drag her grandmother’s eccentric lover away, that moment in time burned itself indelibly into Dana’s psyche. From that moment on, Dana would always associate a man’s kiss, a man’s touch—
any
touch—with murder, with revulsion, with death and decay. It ruined her whole concept of love, romance, sexuality—the whole shebang—for life. From that moment on, the very idea of letting a man touch her in any way, shape or form set her into panic mode.