Threading the Needle (Cobbled Court Quilts, Band 4) - Softcover

Bostwick, Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0758232179 ISBN 13: 9780758232175

Verlag: Kensington, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

From New York Times bestselling author Marie Bostwick comes a beautiful novel of sisterhood lost and found--and of the ways we create the rich tapestries that encompass the past and the future... 

The economic downturn has hit New Bern, Connecticut, and Tessa Woodruff's herbal apothecary shop, For the Love of Lavender, is suffering. So is her once-happy thirty-four-year marriage to Lee. They'd given up everything to come back to New Bern from Boston and start their business, but now they're wondering if they made the right decision. To relieve the strain, Tessa signs up for a quilting class at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop, and to her surprise, rediscovers the power of sisterhood--along with the childhood friend she thought she'd lost forever...

Madelyn Beecher left New Bern twenty years ago and never looked back. But when her husband is convicted of running a Ponzi scheme and she's left with nothing but her late grandmother's cottage, she is forced to return to the town she fled. Unfortunately, the cottage is in terrible shape. Madelyn's only hope is to transform it into an inn. But to succeed, she'll need the help of her fellow quilters, including the one friend she never thought she'd see again--or forgive. Now Madelyn and Tessa will have to relive old memories, forge new ones, and realize it's possible to start over, one stitch at a time--as long as you're surrounded by friends...

Praise for Marie Bostwick and her Cobbled Court Novels

"Bostwick is a topnotch storyteller...Enjoy hours of storytelling that will warm your heart and help renew your belief that people can be good, if given the chance."  --Armchair Interviews

"Heartwarming...Bostwick's contemporary New England quilters series is an unbreakable thread of friendship and faith."  --Publishers Weekly

"As their tenuous bonds grow stronger, each woman discovers how much they can help each other with life's many challenges. Bostwick's writing is warmly nourishing, emotionally compelling...quiet yet powerful." --The Chicago Tribune

"The women in A Single Thread will feel like your own girlfriends--emotional, funny, creative and deeply caring.  It's a story filled with wit and wisdom. Sit back and enjoy this big-hearted novel, and then pass it on to your best friend." --Susan Wiggs, New York Times bestselling author

"Bostwick beautifully captures the very essence of women's friendships--the love, the pain, the trust, the forgiveness--and crafts a seamless and heartfelt novel from them."  --Kristy Kiernan, author of Matters of Faith

"[A] buoyant novel about the value of friendship...a tantalizing book club contender."  --Publishers Weekly

“Bostwick’s series continues to introduce interesting characters and compelling stories that show an appreciation for female friendship as well as a love for the art of quilting. Readers who have exhausted Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilt novels or Clare O’Donohue’s Someday Quilt mysteries will definitely enjoy Bostwick.”  --Library Journal

“...Uplifting.” --RT BookReviews 4 star review

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marie Bostwick was born and raised in the northwest. In the three decades since her marriage, Marie and her family have moved frequently, living in eight different states at eighteen different addresses. These experiences have given Marie a unique perspective that enables her to write about people from all walks of life and corners of the country with insight and authenticity. Marie currently resides in Portland, where she enjoys writing, spending time with family, gardening, collecting fabric, and stitching quilts. Visit her at www.mariebostwick.com.

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Threading the Needle

By MARIE BOSTWICK

KENSINGTON BOOKS

Copyright © 2011 Marie Bostwick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-3217-5

Chapter One

Madelyn

August 2009

I try to resist the urge, but as I sit in the offices of Blackman, Janders, and Whipple, located on the forty-eighth floor of the Mancuso Tower, a cathedral of excess located on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-sixth Street, I can't stop myself from adding it all up in my head and marveling at the true price tag of what Sterling used to call "a lifestyle." How did I fail to see it before? And how am I going to live without it?

How am I going to live at all?

The Oriental rug that sits under the antique mahogany partners desk of my attorney, Eugene Darius Janders, is hand-knotted silk and worth thirty thousand dollars at least—enough to buy a new car. It's very fine, though not as fine as the one in the library in our house in the Hamptons. I mean, the house that used to be ours. And if I added up the rest of the furnishings in Gene's office, it would probably be enough to buy a nice little cottage in the country for cash. Not a cottage in the Hamptons, mind you, but someplace quiet and removed from the city. Connecticut, maybe.

Then there's his wardrobe. Gene's suit is summer-weight wool, tan, two button, side-vented, custom made, probably in London, priced somewhere between five and seven thousand, which, even in New York, is enough to pay a month's rent for a two-bedroom apartment in a very decent part of town. His blue paisley tie, designed by Brioni, retails for one hundred and ninety-five dollars—enough to buy a week's groceries. I think. It's been a while since I did my own grocery shopping.

And the shoes. Oh, the shoes! Hand-tooled calfskin, individually and exquisitely custom made by John Lobb for a very small, exclusive clientele—the trust-fund set, celebrities, the upper echelon of Manhattan's successful lawyers, men like Eugene, a few brokers and money managers, including my husband, Sterling Baron, once one of New York's most successful fund managers, now one of its most notorious—men who don't balk at spending five thousand dollars for shoes. Only the very well-heeled can afford to stride down the sidewalks of New York in a pair of made-to-measure Lobb loafers.

Forgive me. That was a terrible pun, I know. But these days I have to take my humor where I can find it. At the moment, nothing about my life is especially funny.

Four months ago Sterling and I spent, for more than it takes to buy a pair of Lobb oxfords, a weekend in the Boathouse Suite at The Point, a very exclusive resort on the shores of Upper Saranac Lake, and we did it without even looking at the bill.

Was that only four months ago? That seems another lifetime, another life ... because it is.

Exclusive. What a word. I used to think it meant limited to a small number of the "best" people, but I've recently come to realize it means limited to whoever can pay, a club to which my membership has just been rescinded, as Eugene was now explaining.

"Bottom line is, Madelyn, you're broke."

I laughed nervously. "You mean broke like I'll have to rent out the house in the Hamptons this summer? Or broke like I'll have to apply for food stamps?"

"Madelyn, haven't you been listening to anything I've said?"

"I've been trying very hard not to."

"You don't have a house in the Hamptons anymore. The feds have seized it, and the condo in Vail, and the Bentley. The only reason you're still in your apartment is because I convinced the judge to give you until the end of the month to move out."

I felt a pressure in my chest. For a moment, I wondered if I might be having a heart attack, but I'm only fifty-six and in perfect health. I wasn't dying; I was panicking.

"But where am I supposed to go? Can't you get the judge to change his mind? I had nothing to do with this! I didn't cheat the investors out of their money, Sterling did. The investigators have cleared me of any wrongdoing. I knew nothing about it."

It's true. I didn't know anything about it. Sterling was rich when I met him, rich when I married him, and as time went on, he just got richer. He never talked to me about his business. There was no point, he said; matters of high finance were way over my head. "You can't be smart and beautiful, Madelyn, so why don't you stick to beautiful? That's what you do best." When we first married, he said it with a laugh, but after a few years, with a sneer.

Sterling was one of the most successful fund managers in New York. Even in years when the market was down, Sterling's investors made ten percent minimum. Nobody cared how, not until Bernie Madoff was exposed and suddenly the success of money managers with the Midas touch, people like Sterling, was called into question.

I didn't even know Sterling was under investigation until we came home from our weekend at The Point. I remember everything about that weekend, how strange it felt, not because we hadn't been there before—we go to The Point at least two or three times a year—but because of the way Sterling was acting. He was ... how shall I explain it? Attentive. He looked at me, looked me in the eye the way he hasn't looked at me in years. I wondered what he wanted. I kept waiting for him to say something, or do something, or ask for something. But he didn't. He just kept looking at me. And he held my hand when we walked to dinner. He hadn't done that since ... well, not for a very long time. And he didn't bring his cell phone along. He didn't make or take any calls for the entire weekend. Maybe that doesn't seem unusual, but that's because you don't know my husband. Once, we went to dinner at the White House and Sterling left during the salad course to take a call from his secretary. Of course, he was sleeping with his secretary at the time, but that particular call, I believe, was about business.

Anyway, Sterling didn't talk on the phone once that weekend. He talked to me. He listened to me. And for a little while, it was nice, almost like it was in the early days, when he cared, back in the days when I cared too. So long ago.

We didn't talk on the drive home. Sterling seemed to pull into himself. I kept going over the weekend in my mind, thinking that maybe, just maybe, we might be happy, that Sterling had undergone some transformation, decided to be a real husband to me. I wondered if that could be true. And I wondered if it wasn't too late.

Returning home, we were met by stern-faced FBI agents who handcuffed my husband and took him away while I stood watching, hoping I'd wake up from this nightmare soon. I didn't.

Sterling seemed unfazed. With his hands behind his back, half hidden by the starched whiteness of his French cuffs, he calmly told me to call Mike Radnovich and cancel their golf game and then to ask Gene to meet him at the police station.

Gene has never liked me. The feeling is mutual, but he's very good at his job. If anyone could get us out of this mess, it was Gene.

"Seriously, Gene, can't you do something? Talk to the judge, get me some more time? You did it before. I didn't do anything wrong, so why am I being punished? Where do people expect me to live? On the street?"

Gene leaned forward, his forearms resting on his desk. "Madelyn, don't you get it? No one cares. Over the years, Sterling took twenty billion dollars from his clients, told them he was going to invest it for them, all but guaranteed them a minimum ten...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Kensington
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0758232179
• ISBN 13: 9780758232175
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Dietmar Rusche; 15110751138; rusche.dietmar@gmx.de; ; Dr.-Willi-Bergmann-Str. 13; St. Andreasberg; 37444; Deutschland