I would like to thank Rhyll Biest for joining me for a chat. Ryll is a self proclaimed scatter-brained perfectionist and an insomniac; who lives in the penal colony of Canberra (Australia) and is working hard on an exit strategy from her day job. Rhyll's super hot story 'Russian Heat' appears in the 'Dangerous Men, Dangerous Places' Anthology.
What
type of romance do you write?
Erotic romance, but also have a
paranormal manuscript I’m working on.
An article on ‘bus-tration’ (the
frustration of bus transport in Brisbane, Australia) for my university
magazine, I think.
What
is your most recent publication?
The Russian
Heat story in the Dangerous Men,
Dangerous Places anthology
When
did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
If
you weren’t a writer what would you be?
More physically active.
Big, burly and bristling with high-powered weapons,
Vlad and Slava are the best bodyguards and hostile environment consultants
Russian money can buy. They’re also about to meet their five-foot match.
Government veterinarian Jane Ransom expected explosives, shelling and
bad-tempered ewes while working in Russia’s war-ravaged Caucasus mountains, but
nobody warned her about excessively hot Russian bodyguards. Or long hours spent
sandwiched between them in a backseat designed for two. Too bad for the
Russians that Jane’s learned the hard way about men and commitment, and would
sooner be run over by a troika than succumb to lust. But while their client
might be reluctant to take a risk of the carnal variety, Vlad and Slava have
her firmly in their sights, and neither will abandon their mission to keep her
hostage in their bed until she surrenders and realises she belongs to them—for
keeps.
A thunderous explosion rocked the snow-dotted
mountains, the blast jerking Jane Ransom’s head up from the hypodermic she held
poised.
As the rumble
echoed across the mountains and shook the dirt under her feet, shale and
pebbles slid down the incline and cloven hooves scrabbled around her, raising a
cloud of dust. Panicked fleeces flashed by, a blur in her peripheral vision as
the ewe between her knees began to struggle, joining in the nervous bleat of
the flock.
Tightening her aching
legs around its girth, she locked the bicep turning its head at a thirty degree
angle and held on long enough to finish swabbing the puncture site and collect
her blood sample.
Her back twinged
as she freed the ewe and straightened, the ripe smell of lanolin-rich wool
fading from her nostrils.
Her hundredth
customer done and dusted, despite the half-hearted shelling rattling the Vodsk
Pass all day. Another hundred samples and she could confirm the epidemic pathogen
type in these parts.
Adrenalin from her
struggle with the ewe kept charging through her veins, addling her brain and
making her slow to notice the way Vlad had raised his rifle and Slava was
scoping the west ridge with binoculars. Hired guns they might be, but their
training and instincts were excellent, and she’d learned to pay attention when
they paid attention. And follow orders. Like the one Slava issued now. He eyed
her and pointed at the all-terrain vehicle with a familiar, nerve-grating
gesture.
Muttering, she stashed
her blood-filled vacutainer in her storage box, grabbed her sharps bucket and
high-tailed it to the safety of the armour-plated Zhiguli.
Yuri sat behind
the wheel, a battered, hand-rolled smoke dangling from his lower lip. His
rollie filled the car with tobacco fumes pungent enough to make diving back out
into the war zone a temptation. Barely eighteen, downy fluff coated his top lip
and he swam inside his body armour, unlike the two men backing toward her with
rifle points raised.
Viacheslav
Alexandrovich Vlasov and Vladislav Ivanovich Markov. When she’d first heard
their names she thought she’d have to call them V1 and V2, then she’d heard
them call each other Slava and Vlad and had stuck with that. The two were
military through and through, cocky from boot tip to brush cut, their good
looks a warning shot to celibacy. She’d bet her last vacutainer they’d left a
trail of broken hearts all the way from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg. One look
at her appointed hostile environment consultants and she’d realised that hob-nobbing
through the Caucasus Mountains sampling animals for anthrax and other diseases
would be the least dangerous part of her job.
As she shed her
body armour and helmet behind the car door, Vlad sank to kneel beside her,
rifle point angled at the west ridge. Her heart did a lazy flip-flop because
she knew what he would say next—what he always said when it was time to get
back in the car.
“Sandwich time,
Jane.”
Oh, God.
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