Worthy opponents, p.1
Worthy Opponents, page 1
Worthy Opponents is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Steel
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the DP colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Steel, Danielle, author.
Title: Worthy opponents : a novel / Danielle Steel.
Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022039202 (print) | LCCN 2022039203 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984821805 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781984821812 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3569.T33828 W67 2023 (print) | LCC PS3569.T33828 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20220818
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039202
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039203
Ebook ISBN 9781984821812
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Sara Bereta, adapted for ebook
Cover image: © mila_hu/Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Dedication
By Danielle Steel
About the Author
_142781534_
Chapter 1
Spencer Brooke was a small, trim woman, with a subtle but very definite sense of style. She stood out in a crowd, and was noticeably chic. She wore her blond hair in a bun at work and loose when she was at home. At thirty-seven, she ran a major enterprise. She was the owner and CEO of one of the most respected department stores in New York, Brooke and Son, more commonly known as Brooke’s. Although her more distant ancestors and her mother’s family had all been bankers for generations, her father’s family had been in the retail business. She was the fourth generation. It was in her blood. She loved the store and everything about it, and had ever since she was a child. She loved the smell of it, of muted perfume, the moment she walked through the door, and the elegance of the merchandise they carried, which made her proud whenever she saw it.
She was fourteen years old when her grandfather, Thornton Brooke, told her that one day she would run the store. It had never occurred to her before, but from then on, she had taken special pride in it. Her grandfather was eighty years old then. He taught her the things she would need to know one day, and would later quiz her on the information he’d shared with her. Brooke’s in its present form had been Thornton’s dream as a young man.
Thornton’s father, Jeremiah, had owned the largest, most successful department store in New York. He had established it with his own inherited fortune in 1920, with a partner. They called it Johnson and Brooke, and when Jeremiah bought out his partner a year later, he kept the name. They had the finest elite customers in the city. All of Jeremiah’s male relatives before him had been bankers, and his own father was skeptical when Jeremiah founded the store with the family money he had inherited. Jeremiah had an unfailing instinct for and attraction to retail. He knew just what both men and women wanted to buy, and he supplied it, bringing in the highest quality merchandise from Europe, and beautifully designed pieces from all the luxury brands in the States.
Thornton was nine years old when suddenly everything changed. He didn’t understand what had happened at first. The family moved from their mansion on Fifth Avenue to a small apartment in Gramercy Park. His grandfather’s bank closed its doors, and he heard his parents speak of the closing of the store in whispers. Jeremiah gave up his beloved store nine years after he’d opened it in the same year that his son Thornton was born. Thornton was twelve when he fully understood that they had lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929, which was why Jeremiah had to lose the store and go to work at a men’s haberdashery. Thornton’s mother cried all the time, and his father wore a perennially grim expression from then on. The servants Thornton had grown up with had disappeared. The family had kept one maid. Meals with his parents were a silent hour of torture. Thornton couldn’t wait to escape to his room. Unlike others they knew who had lost even more than they had, the family had enough to live on, in a frugal existence. They just managed to get by, but they had a roof over their heads and weren’t starving. His father had looked older instantly, and suffered from ill health from then on, but went to work anyway. Even as an adult, Thornton could remember vividly how gray his father had become. Everything about him was gray, his hair, his face, the atmosphere in the house.
They had saved enough to send Thornton to college. He went to Princeton as all the men in his family had before him. He was twenty-one years old and a senior when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Two months later, he enlisted in the army. He spent the war in Europe, and survived the invasion of Normandy. His father, Jeremiah, died of tuberculosis at fifty-seven while Thornton was away at war. He returned to find his mother looking ancient and frail, although she was only fifty. The days of glory had never come again. In his spare time during the war, Thornton dreamed of opening a store, not on the grand scale of the one they’d had, but something smaller and just as exclusive. He had no idea how he would do it, but he knew he would. He had a more outgoing, cheerful, positive personality than his parents. He came home from the war older and wiser, with a fire in his belly, and a dream.
Thornton met Hannabel Phillips six months after he got back from Europe and was released by the army. Hannabel was a beautiful, lively girl from Virginia. Thornton was mad for her. His father had left him a small amount of money. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was a start. They married in 1945. She was working in an exclusive dress shop uptown in New York and had a style of her own. She had the same passion for fashion and high-quality merchandise that Thornton did. She was a year younger than Thorny, as his friends called him. She hadn’t been to college, but she was a bright girl. Neither of them was afraid to disagree with the other. Thornton loved a good argument, even with his wife, and she was a worthy opponent. He had strong opinions, and he never lost sight of his dreams.
Their son, Tucker, was born on their first anniversary. There had been complications during the birth, and the doctors told them afterwards that Hannabel wouldn’t be able to have other children, but she and Thornton were happy with their only son. Tucker was a strapping baby boy.
He didn’t have his parents’ fiery, outgoing nature, but he had an aptitude for math even as a child, and a passion for finance. He talked about being a banker or an accountant when he grew up. He learned to add and subtract before he learned to read. He had his ancestors’ bankers’ blood in his veins and none of the entrepreneurial “retail blood” of his grandfather Jeremiah or his father.
Tucker was a quiet child. He and his father had little in common, and Tucker barely saw him. Thorny was working two jobs during the week, and a third on the weekends. Hannabel stayed home to take care of their son, and she was clever at helping Thorny save his money. She made their clothes, upholstered their furniture, and made their curtains. Four years after Thorny had come home from the war, he had enough money to go to a bank, looking respectable and sufficiently financially sound to borrow the rest of what he needed to open a store. Twenty-one years after his father had had to close the most exclusive department store in the city, Thorny opened his own small, very elegant shop, far downtown from where his father’s much larger store had been. He was thirty years old and full of great ideas. He had an instinct for men’s clothing and Hannabel taught him what he needed to know about women’s apparel.
The store was an instant success and turned into a goldmine. Ten years later, in 1960, he bought a large old building near his small exclusive shop in the same poor neighborhood and turned the inside into a thing of beauty. It was like a secret treasure in a place where you’d least expect it. Brooke’s was an institution by then, famous for its luxurious, elegant clothes for men and women. The staff brought over the latest fashions from Europe and worked closely with high-end American designers, often influencing what they produced. Brooke’s had one-of-a-kind pieces. The store was a gem, although the outside of the building itself was ugly. It was on the fringes of a marginal neighborhood, so Thorny had bought the building cheap, but no one seemed to care about the location, as he had guessed they wouldn’t. Inside, the store was elegant and luxurious, and smelled of fine leather and expensive perfume. The décor was avant-garde and up-to-date. The most elegant society women in New York came from uptown to shop at Brooke’s. They knew they would always find something special
Thornton reveled in the sheer pleasure of what he did and what he sold. The merchandise in the store was known for its high quality and stylishness. He brought samples home to Hannabel sometimes to ask her advice, and she came into the store to give him her opinion on displays and merchandise. They were a team, in the most modern way, although Hannabel didn’t work at the store. She didn’t need to. She had an unfailing eye where fashion was concerned. Like Thornton, she knew their merchandise by heart, and she knew even better what women would want to wear next season or next year. With Hannabel’s instincts and his own, Thornton built Brooke and Son into a booming business. He fully expected his son, Tucker, to come into the business with him when he graduated from Princeton. Thorny had taken Tucker with him to Princeton as a child when he went to annual reunions. He had no trouble convincing Tucker to attend Princeton, but it was nearly impossible to get him interested in the store. Another offshoot of their gene pool ran through his veins. As he got older, the only thing that held Tucker’s attention was finance. He had no choice but to comply with his father’s demands. Thornton made it clear to his son at an early age that he expected him to work at the store. Tucker felt as though a life sentence in prison awaited him when he graduated. He begged to go to business school, just to postpone going to work at the store. Thornton granted him that wish, deciding that having a master’s degree in business might be useful for them.
Tucker married Eileen, a girl from an extremely restrained, conservative family in Boston, who had as little interest in commerce as Tucker did himself. Her family, with old money and old-fashioned ideas, frankly disapproved of Tucker’s family’s involvement in a store. Tucker was working at Brooke’s by then, and was embarrassed by it, and so was his wife. Tucker worked in the finance office, and Thornton could easily see him becoming CFO one day, but not CEO. Thornton jokingly said to Hannabel that he would just have to run the store himself until a grandson arrived who could run it with him. Tucker was never going to be that person. Eileen had no interest in fashion and wore dreary, conservative clothes like her mother. Everything she wore looked dowdy and shapeless. She wasn’t an unattractive woman, but the style in which she dressed made her seem that way, and Tucker preferred it. They were cautious about everything, not risk-takers, and they waited until Eileen was nearly thirty-nine, and Tucker nearly forty, after twelve years of marriage, to conceive their first child. They had been in no hurry to have children, often thought of and would have preferred not having any, but finally gave in to social and familial pressure. They felt that a baby would be an intrusion on their marriage.
There was no doubt in their minds that the baby would be a son, once Eileen was pregnant. Thornton was thrilled at the prospect. They didn’t even bother to consider girls’ names. They were that sure that it was going to be a baby boy. Tucker hoped he’d be a banker one day, and so did Eileen, not a “shopkeeper,” as she referred to her father-in-law with disdain. They decided to call him Spencer, a family name on Eileen’s side. Thornton had been afraid they wouldn’t have children at all and was greatly relieved at the idea of a grandson. He wanted a grandson to continue the tradition of Brooke’s. Both Tucker and Eileen were shocked when told their baby was a girl. The possibility had never occurred to them, and they named her Spencer anyway, and were sorely disappointed.
She was beautiful without a doubt, with her white-blond hair, but she wasn’t a boy. Tucker could hardly see himself painting a sign that said “Brooke and Daughter.” Eileen and Tucker acted as though a misfortune had befallen them and viewed Spencer’s sex as an embarrassing failure. As a result, most of the time they ignored her and left her to a nanny. They had been willing to accept a son, but not a daughter.
Spencer’s grandfather adjusted to her arrival sooner than her father when he saw how bright she was. She adored her grandparents, who were warm and loving to her. Hannabel rarely left home without a hat with a little chic veil, and Spencer loved trying on her grandmother’s hats. Her lackluster parents always acted as though there had been a mistake, and she was somebody else’s child. She was so different from her parents and much more like her grandparents.
Spencer loved helping out at the store as early as in her teens. She had a proper summer job there in the stockroom at seventeen and was selling on the floor at eighteen. She followed fashion trends closely and absorbed all the information her grandfather shared with her. She remembered everything. His words were sacred to her. She attended Parsons School of Design simultaneously with Eugene Lang College, and majored in fashion administration. After flirting briefly with the idea of becoming a designer, she decided she preferred the opportunities that the store provided her. And at her father’s urging, she got her master’s in business administration at Columbia.
She went to work at the store as soon as she got her graduate degree. She and her grandfather had an extraordinary first year of her working there full-time. He shared the secrets of his success in retail with her. She learned more than she’d ever dreamed she would at the feet of the master, and they had a great time together. Two of his favorite mottos were “Never be afraid of change” and “Don’t get stuck in a rut just because something has always been done a certain way.” He had remarkably forward, modern ideas about marketing and merchandising. He was ninety-one at the time, at the pinnacle of success, still full of energy, and always with a new idea he wanted to try. He listened to the comments made by his staff, and always found a way to blend new ideas with old ones in his own distinctive way.
Spencer’s father was still CFO then, having hated every year he’d worked there, and eager to retire at sixty-six after an undistinguished career in the shadow of his father. But Spencer was still a long way from being ready to take over, and Thornton had no desire to relinquish the reins to anyone yet, not even his beloved granddaughter, who at her age still had much to learn about the business. Thornton was still having too much fun running his store to retire.
Hannabel came through frequently, always with a critical eye on the merchandise, with useful comments to make to her husband. Thornton always listened to her. She was rarely wrong. Styles had changed, but the concepts of successful retailing hadn’t. Spencer learned a great deal from both of them. She loved working for her grandfather.
The idea of moving the store to a better, fancier location uptown had been discussed many times, but Thornton always rejected it. Although the neighborhood had improved in the last fifty years, it still bordered on some seedy areas. The customers who came from uptown in droves didn’t seem to mind, and more than ever, Brooke’s was an unexpected jewel in the midst of a dicey neighborhood, which Thornton felt gave them a certain cachet. He owned the building, and he had no desire to sell it and move. He thought it would just make the store seem ordinary if they moved uptown. It was the one point he was always adamant about, and since his instincts had always been infallible on all subjects, his advisors at the store no longer challenged him about a move. They stayed where they were, on the border of what was now Chelsea, with some tenements still nearby. The location didn’t worry Thornton at all. The store was a moneymaker beyond even what Thornton had dreamed of. It was a goldmine.
* * *
—
No one was prepared when Thornton had a massive stroke and died in his sleep the night before his ninety-second birthday, especially Spencer, and Thornton’s wife, Hannabel, even more so. She was paralyzed by grief. They’d been married for sixty-seven years. Everyone was devastated, even the employees. They closed the store out of respect the next day. Everything about Thornton Brooke and his incredible energy had suggested that he was immortal and would live forever. His sudden death had stunned them all.
