THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

stranger to keep on stroking and licking and sucking her as her hands clenched in his hair. She wanted him to keep his mouth on her intimate flesh, his hands on her body. Just a few minutes more…
    Then the sound came again. A beeping. Familiar but wrong. Out of place in the dream. What the hell was it? It sounded like a … oh, hell, a monitor alarm!
    She came awake with a start.
    The first thing she saw was the bedrail on the left side. Then the IV pole with the suspended bag of deep red fluid. She glanced down to see an IV line disappearing into her arm.
    Holy shit. She was in hospital. And the beeping was a monitor. It blinked at her from its position right beside the IV pole.
    Glancing at her hand, she saw the pulse oximeter had slipped off her finger. She slid the clothespin-like device back on and the beeping stopped. A quick glance at the monitor showed her oxygen saturation was okay.
    Oh, man, she was really in hospital? Being transfused ?
    She pressed her legs together beneath the blankets, and the last traces of arousal from her sex dream withered. Urinary catheter. Ugh . She was definitely being transfused. But why?
    Omigod, the alley! Heart suddenly hammering, she struggled to sit up.
    “Ah, you’re awake. That’s good.”
    She yelped, more at the unexpected hand on her shoulder urging her back against the pillows than at the masculine voice from the right side of her bed.
    “Easy. You’re safe now. I’m a doctor.”
    Her gaze locked on him and she let out a gasp.
    It was him . The man she’d been imagining, the stranger/lover.
    Okay, she was still dreaming. She must be. How else could she have conjured him to look exactly like the man in her dream?
    Then another thought struck her: maybe she was dead .
    Maybe she never escaped the alley after all. Maybe her lifeless body lay there still in a blood-darkened puddle, and this vision, this whole hospital room encounter, was just the result of her oxygen-starved brain dying.
    She closed her eyes for a second and reopened them. The man beside her remained unchanged. Shoulder-length black hair, glossy under the lights, sprang back from a widow’s peak. Behind the lenses of Italian designer frames, dark brown eyes glowed like banked coals under heavy, slashing eyebrows. Dark, intense, sexy.
    She started to lift a hand, thinking to touch his face to test if he were flesh and bone, but — ow, ow, ow — was quickly reminded that her arm had been harpooned with an IV catheter.
    Okay, so it looked like she hadn’t dreamed him, she wasn’t dead, and she really was being transfused. So she had to be in hospital. But oh, baby, if this was the ER, this guy was new to the rotation.
    “Where am I?”
    “You’re under my care, and you’re currently being treated for blood loss and shock.”
    Blood loss.
    She shivered convulsively. The alley. A creature straight out of her nightmares had attacked her, driven his teeth deep into her neck and — 
    No!
    Her mind shied away from the memory. Better to stick with the rational, the world she knew. Medicine.
    Her gaze flicked back to the IV pole. “Whole blood?”
    “Yes.”
    “How much have I had?”
    “We’re coming up on 2000 mls.”
    She felt her face go slack. “So much?”
    “By my estimate, you’d lost almost forty percent of your blood, Miss Crawford.”
    Holy Hannah. Her gaze leapt back to the unit of blood suspended from the IV pole, her brain ticking at a hundred miles an hour. “Then you wouldn’t have had time to crossmatch the blood…”
    “It’s perfectly crossmatched.”
    She blinked. How’d he manage that feat? With this kind of blood loss, they usually started pushing the O-neg while they waited for typing and crossmatching, switching to the precise match as soon as they had the info. In any case, if they’d pushed that much blood, her coagulation factors would almost certainly be out of whack…
    She lifted her right hand — carefully this time — to her neck, only to find her puncture wounds covered by a dressing. She clapped her gaze back on the hunky doctor who sat so quietly at her bedside. The doctor who in her dreams had blazed a trail of kisses down her body……
    She blinked the image away, cleared her throat and asked, “What about the possibility of a bleed?”
    He lifted a dark eyebrow. “You know your transfusion medicine.”
    “I should. I’m an OR nurse.”
    “Indeed.” The corner of his mouth lifted in what might have been a smile, but he obligingly ran