Hi Chris,
If I've understood correctly what you're after, then yes this would be possible but you would still need the crossover cable between the two ESXi hosts to maintain the requirement for keeping some traffic off the production network. The obvious issue with this is that it doesn't scale if you need to add any additional hosts (but this could be resolved by adding a separate switch).
The ESXi hosts would need one virtual switch backed by your production network interfaces (assume two interfaces for redundancy), and a second virtual switch backed by the crossover interface. So each host would need at least 3 NIC ports.
The VM's would have two interfaces connected to the port groups of each virtual switch, one for production traffic and the other for direct crossover traffic. When the VM's are on the same host, the traffic should traverse the backplane of the host and then on separate hosts it should traverse the crossover cable. See attached pic of what it looks like in my head.
Hopefully that makes sense!
Cheers, Jon