Vital Signs Read Online Free Page A

number.” She waved a hand at Roy and Nicole and hurried off toward the nurses’ station, tail swishing with gay abandon.
    Nicole watched her go. “Now there’s an unusual woman for you.”
    â€œVicious is more like it.” The looks she’d given him were lethal. He wouldn’t want her armed with a hypodermic.
    â€œShe’s not vicious, she’s gutsy.” Nicole looped an arm through Roy’s, and they hurried toward thenurses’ desk. “Balls enough to tell you off and enough perspective to accept the parameters of her job. It’s evident she really likes being a nurse.”
    â€œNurses, lawyers—power. It’s all about power with you females.”
    But he silently agreed with Nicole. Hailey Bergstrom was an example of someone who’d obviously found the perfect job, and it suited her, even the part that included wearing rabbit ears and a tail.
    Or cutting him into chunks and spitting out the pieces.

CHAPTER TWO
    F ROM THE NURSES’ STATION Hailey watched them go down the corridor, Zedyck’s arm looped around the woman’s shoulders.
    They could have posed for a magazine ad, she mused. They made a striking couple, both tall, both blessed with an abundance of physical beauty.
    Nicole was a stunner, but based on one short meeting, she also seemed to be a truly nice person, lacking the self-centered attitude that sometimes went with such good looks.
    Hailey’s mind naturally turned to her older sister, Laura. Laura was drop-dead gorgeous, too, but in Hailey’s opinion, Laura was about as self-centered as it was possible to get. She’d carved out a perfect life, by her standards, and wasn’t the least bit interested in other people’s choices. She’d married Frank, a creep with the same sort of good looks she possessed, produced two perfect kids and decorated a house in the suburbs with a lot of help from Martha Stewart’s magazines.
    Hailey wouldn’t know Martha Stewart if the woman had a stroke in her living room, which was probable if she ever laid eyes on it.
    How different could two sisters be?
    And it was interesting how beautiful women gravitated to men whose looks complemented their own.
    Roy Zedyck was as dark as Nicole was fair, and in spite of his mental lapses, he was good to look at, if your taste ran to crooked noses and grass-green eyes and jawlines out of an old western. Good hair, too. She liked it wavy and covering a guy’s shirt collar, the way his did.
    For the remaining two hours of her shift, Hailey worked steadily, checking on David often, changing babies and feeding them, telling wild stories and singing nonsense songs as she slowly got her older patients into their pajamas. She ensured that everyone’s meds were administered and did her best to make the kids laugh whenever she could. Even the sickest of them rewarded her with tiny smiles, and to her those smiles were precious gifts.
    Hailey always took her time with the kids, even though she knew her supervisor, Margaret Cross, repeatedly documented her for spending too much time with the patients and not enough getting the paperwork done before the next shift arrived.
    Margaret was a nurse of the old school who made a point of coming to work in a white dress uniform, white stockings and her nursing cap, a regalia that had the other nurses calling her TGONP behind her back—the ghost of nurses past.
    It was obvious Margaret hated her, and Hailey pretended she didn’t give a flying fig. The head nurse couldn’t get her fired, no matter how much she disapproved. That was the beauty of knowingyou were excellent at your job. Oh, yeah, and a good union helped, too.
    The thing was, there was no way you could rush little kids, nor should you. It was hard enough for them, trapped in here, feeling sick, most of them horribly lonely for their parents. They needed to have some control over their environment, Hailey felt, and if it came in