New duet Hot Summer Nights with a Billionaire is the first duet by two writing best buddies, Heidi Rice and Abby Green, so as it’s National Best Friends Day, it’s the perfect time to celebrate their friendship and the new duet coming soon to Modern Romance! 

*

Heidi

Even though Abby is from Dublin and I’m from London, we actually met for the first time in San Francisco (glamorous much?), when I finalled in the Romance Writers of America RITAs awards for my second book The Mile High Club back in 2008 and I decided to head off to the Romance Writers of America conference alone. I have to admit when I got to San Francisco I was a bit lost, the conference was actually HUGE and I knew NO ONE! Until Abby made it her mission to befriend me and introduce me around to all the other Mills & Boon authors there. It wasn’t long before we were spending far too much time in the bar together, bonding over writing gossip and margaritas (and basically going to virtually no workshops!). I had an absolute ball – even though I didn’t win the award (did I mentioned I finalled already?!) I won something much better, an amazing friend to help we through the slings and arrows of my writing life. Whenever I have a panic attack about my latest book, Abby’s there at the end of the phone to listen to my moaning and brainstorm my plot, characters, etc until I can unstick myself. And I’m happy to do the same for her when she’s freaking out. We’ve been on writing retreats together in Ireland and Wales, stalked both Diana Gabaldon and Nora Roberts together and even been on a road trip to Austin, Texas (where she somehow managed to direct us into a military airbase! Fabulous friend, great writer, but can’t read a map as it turns out)… Not to mention we’ve been roomies at a host of other writers’ conferences. So when our editors suggested us writing a duet together we just had to do it…

Abby came up with the initial idea, two best mates from very different backgrounds – one the daughter of an Irish housekeeper and the other the daughter of a callous British aristocrat. Our girls had bonded as teenagers and always had each other’s backs, even though they have become very different women. My heroine, the Brit, Cassandra James, is now a focussed career woman with a top-flight job as the assistant to taciturn British billionaire Zachary Temple and, Abby’s girl, Ashling Doyle, is a free-spirited Irish yoga teacher. Add in bad boy US tech billionaire Luke Broussard who Cassie is gonna have to spy on at a society wedding in Frisco for her boss Temple, and you’ve got the basic idea for the duet – with our girls swapping their ideal hero for the guy they SO shouldn’t be matched with… We had a lot of fun – and some angst (hey, that’s our process!) – writing these books, and I discovered it really helps to have a friend you can be straight with when it comes to writing a shared prologue! Especially when you decide the shared prologue was a really stupid idea and you scrap it… I love Abby to bits, and I love these two books… And I can’t wait to see what readers make of this duet.

 

 Abby 

I loved working on the upcoming ‘Hot Summer Nights with a Billionaire’ duet with my best writing pal, Heidi Rice. Basically any excuse to have a legitimate reason to talk for hours on the phone was a win win. The fact that we got the books written was a miracle.

I’d like to be able to claim that Cassie and Ashling’s romantic adventures with Luke and Zach are based on real events, but alas, they’re not. But we promise we did tons of research, all in the name of delivering the most authentic characters and settings ;). We suffer for our art, truly, just check out our Pinterest boards if you don’t believe us.

I first met Heidi at a Romance Writers of America conference in San Francisco where we bonded as conference newbies and then over movies and books and pretty much everything else!

She’s my first port of call when I’m tearing my hair out with plot snafus and she’s an excellent companion on impromptu road trips to places like Ashford in the west of Ireland to see Nora Roberts give a talk, which then morphed into another road trip to Inverness to see Diana Gabaldon. This friendship is long distance and high maintenance, people!

But seriously, she’s my wing woman and my ride or die. Just don’t let me read a map in Texas – I get mixed up between Army Airbases and International Airports. Well that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it…:)

Hope you enjoy our stories of two best friends bagging the loves of their lives who just happen to be gorgeous billionaires. Funny how life works out, isn’t it?!

 *

Hot Summer Nights with a Billionaire is about two BFFs, two seriously gorgeous billionaires and lots of hot summer nights in San Francisco, London, a private island off the coast of Oregon and a lavish country estate in the British Countryside… Don’t miss…

Cassie’s story: One Wild Night with Her Enemy by Heidi Rice, July 2021, Modern Romance

Ashling’s story: The Flaw in his Red-Hot Revenge by Abby Green, August 2021, Modern Romance

 

By Lauren Gardiner