Have Body, Will Guard

The Have Body, Will Guard series am began with a daydream about running away to an exotic location, meeting a handsome guy and having an adventure. In the first book in the series, Three Wrong Turns in the Desert, Aidan Greene is dumped by his boyfriend of ten years, and on a whim he takes a job teaching English as a second language in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

He meets handsome bodyguard Liam McCullough and gets roped into helped him chase a Tuareg tribe through the desert. By the end of the book, they’re in love and Aidan decides to stay with Liam and become a bodyguard himself.

Dancing with the Tide picks up a few months later, after Aidan has attended a bodyguard training course and begun learning the business of personal protection. They are asked to protect a young Arabic pop star who has received death threats after coming out of the closet.

I wrote the first book hoping to reach a mainstream audience, so I drew the curtain on sex. But after signing with Loose Id, I knew I’d have to open those bedroom doors and show how Aidan and Liam connected. For the second book, though, I started with a bang-- literally. This new book is hot by design, and it was great fun to write.

One of the stories in the Surfer Boys anthology I edited was set in Djerba, a resort island off the coast of Tunisia, and I thought that would be a fun place to take Aidan and Liam and their client.

The guys go kite-surfing off the coast in this book as a way to work off some tension. Djerba has featured in Greek mythology and in Homer’s Odyssey, and it’s a gorgeous island of palm trees and resort hotels. Aidan and Liam explore the island while protecting their client, and the villa where they’re staying provides time for sexy encounters as well.

I was inspired by a lot of the photographs I found on line, like this one, of a turreted ruin somewhere in the Tunisian desert.



I love the bright, sun-washed look of these buildings. They remind me about the strong contrast between dark and light in these hot, sunny climates. There’s always going to be some danger in a Liam and Aidan book-- someone’s trying to kill the client, and there’s a mystery man who romances the client and then moves in. The book was a lot of fun to write, and I hope readers will enjoy it too.

In the third book in the series, Teach Me Tonight, they've been hired to protect Maks Bazarov, a spoiled teenager attending an English-language institute in Bizerte, on Tunisia's north coast, and sparks really start to fly (literally!) once they're in place. Someone really wants to kidnap Maks, and will go to great lengths to do so, even trying to set the monastery where the institute is taking place on fire.

Liam faces an opponent who represents his own dark side -- a soldier of fortune who is smart, strong and ruthless. Liam needs Joey’s help -- but will his attraction to his hunky pal damage his relationship with Aidan? Will Aidan turn his back on his burgeoning career as a bodyguard to return to his first love, teaching?
In his past life, teaching in Philadelphia and living with his ex-partner, Aidan had taken courses in massage, gourmet cooking, flower arranging, and a host of other skills, most of which proved useless in Tunis. The massage lessons, however, had been invaluable.

You can find all my Loose Id books here: http://www.loose-id.com/Our-Authors/Neil-Plakcy/