Thread and Nail

Savannah, Georgia Colony, 1740. Thomas Hendricks came back from war with steady hands and a rule he's kept since boyhood: don't look, don't want, don't reach.

Then William Ashford looks at him across a candlelit schoolroom, and the rule breaks.

Thomas is a transported convict turned blacksmith, a man whose body remembers violence before it remembers tenderness. William is a tailor's apprentice with careful hands and a dangerous secret. In a colony where their love is a hanging offence, every stolen glance is a gamble - and what they find at the forge, along the bluff, in the narrow hours between duty and dawn, is a want too fierce to stay hidden.

To survive, they'll need more than each other. They'll need Mary Collingwood.

Mary is a tavern keeper with a head for numbers and a heart she's learned to keep quiet. She loved a woman once, in Charleston, and that love taught her what the world does to people who feel the wrong things for the wrong people. When she offers a marriage of protection - her name and William's, a legal shield for a household built on trust instead of convention - the three of them begin building something the colony has no language for: a family forged from necessity, affection, and the stubborn refusal to disappear.

But colonial Georgia is no place for quiet revolution. A sadistic master holds William's contract. War with Spain drags Thomas into the killing ground of Bloody Marsh. And when a new minister arrives with a gift for moral surveillance, the careful architecture of their lives comes under threat from the one force they cannot outwork or outrun - institutional suspicion.

Thread and Nail is a sweeping work of literary historical fiction set in the raw, contested landscape of pre-Revolutionary America. Through a blacksmith, a tailor, and a tavern keeper, it asks what it takes to build something worth keeping in a world determined to tear it down - and whether love, practised as craft, can endure the fire that forges it.

For readers of TJ Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain - a story of found family, forbidden love, and the people who refuse to be erased.

After spending over a decade in HR decoding human behavior in corporate boardrooms, I now explore the beautiful complexity of human connection through LGBTQ+ fiction. My novels span from contemporary Knoxville to colonial Savannah, but always return to the same truth: we're all bound by invisible threads of love, loss, and resilience.

My contemporary novel 'Love is Blind' follows David, a blind law student, and Hunter, a police academy cadet, as they rebuild their lives after tragedy. My historical fiction 'Thread and Nail' unearths forbidden romance between apprentices in 1740s Georgia.

My stories often begin with images that wake me at night-moments so vivid I must capture them before they fade. With a background in theater and a lifelong love of history, I believe in the power of words to create new worlds and illuminate hidden truths.

I hold an MS in HR Management. When not writing, I'm diving into historical archives or observing the fascinating webs that connect us all. I live in France with my husband, where I continue to uncover stories that deserve to be told.