She stitched fortunes for other women. Now she must claim her own.
New York, 1895. Nora Bellini has spent years creating beautiful things for women who will never know her name.
An Italian immigrant from Naples, Nora works long hours in a shirtwaist factory while secretly pursuing the one dream she has never dared speak aloud: to become a dressmaker worthy of Fifth Avenue.
Then an unexpected inheritance changes everything. Mrs. Charlotte Van Cortlandt, the wealthy woman who recognized Nora’s extraordinary talent and trained her in secret, leaves Nora half ownership of an elite Fifth Avenue fashion house. There is only one condition. Nora must run it for a year with the other heir, Jameson Aldridge, an impoverished gentleman whose proud old New York family once belonged to the very society that has spent Nora’s lifetime keeping women like her outside its doors.
He needs the salon to restore what his family lost. She needs it to build the future she has stitched toward all her life. Neither intends to need the other.
But as Nora’s designs begin attracting the attention of New York’s most powerful women, success brings dangerous scrutiny. Rival dressmakers want her ruined, creditors threaten everything they are building, and the rigid boundaries of class and heritage make the growing attraction between Nora and Jameson impossible to ignore.
Caught between the Italian family she loves and the glittering Gilded Age world she longs to enter, Nora must decide whether belonging means accepting the place others have chosen for her or having the courage to claim one of her own.
From the crowded tenements of Mulberry Street to the salons and ballrooms of Fifth Avenue, Threads of Fortune is a sweeping romantic historical novel of an immigrant seamstress, forbidden ambition, family loyalty, social class, and a love that challenges the rules of Gilded Age New York.
