An American Beauty

Inspired by the true rags-to-riches life of Arabella Huntington, this historical novel opens in 1867 Richmond where seventeen-year-old Arabella works at Worsham’s gambling parlor wearing the same low-cut purple gown as the other girls. Her statuesque beauty, grit, and resolve set her apart and lead to a charged affair with railroad baron Collis Huntington, thirty years her senior. With Collis’s help Arabella moves to New York posing as a genteel Southern widow. Using Collis’s seed money and her own shrewd investing instincts she amasses a fortune, marries Collis after his wife’s death, and must navigate the rules of Society, threats of blackmail, and an unexpected, impossible romance that tests her ambitions and loyalties.