By Beverley Eikli aka Beverley Oakley

I love villains. The villain of my latest erotic historical romance, Saving Grace, is a prime piece of work. He’s a handsome rich boy and the cousin of my heroine, Rose, who’s a poor serving girl until she’s cast onto the dungheap of society by losing her job after she safeguards the secret of the man she loves.

This is a poignant tale of love and redemption and very different from my two racy historical intrigues which were, respectively shortlisted for Australian Romance Readers Favourite Historical of 2011 and 2012.

The first of these is Rake’s Honour which features a truly ghastly villain. Wart-covered, foul-breathed, gout-ridden Lord Slyther is a big incentive for a carefully nurtured (albeit adventurous) heroine to take risks. So when Fanny falls for our hero, Lord Fenton, she goes to great lengths to convince him she’s the bride he’s looking for. The trouble is, they’ve already met in less than auspicious cirscumstances so Fanny has an uphill battle before she can win the day and hoist her feller on his own petard. The thing I’ve most enjoyed reading from reviewers is that so many laughed out loud at the ending.

In A Little Deception, Helena, the sister-in-law of my heroine Rose, is the villainess. Exquisitely beautiful and utterly ruthless, she will do anything to make Rose pay for the cruel hand fate has dealt her for which she believes Rose responsible. Helena, you see, is married to Rose’s milksop but adoring brother and would have loved an extramarital affair with our gorgeous hero. Unfortunately for her, Rose accidentally tricked him into marriage instead.

If you’re into plots that take unexpected twists, villains (or villainesses with axes to grind) and roller-coaster endings, these books might fit the bill.

Bio

Beverley Eikli (aka Beverley Oakley) wrote her first romance when she was seventeen. However, drowning the heroine on the last page (p550!) was, she discovered, not in the spirit of the genre so her romance-writing career ground to a halt and she became a journalist.

After throwing in her secure job on South Australia’s metropolitan daily The Advertiser to manage a luxury safari lodge in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, Beverley discovered a new world of romance and adventure in a thatched cottage in the middle of a mopane forest with the handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a camp fire.

Eighteen years later, after exploring the world in the back of Cessna 404s and CASA 212s as an airborne geophysical survey operator during low-level sorties over the French Guyanese jungle and Greenland’s ice cap, Beverley is back in Australia living a more conventional life with her husband and two daughters in a pretty country town an hour north of Melbourne. She writes Regency Historical Intrigue as Beverley Eikli and erotic historicals as Beverley Oakley.

You can read more on Beverley’s website.

Buy Saving Grace here.

Buy Rake’s Honour here.

Buy A Little Deception here.

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