Worthy Opponents
by Danielle Steel
To my wonderful children, Beatrix, Trevor, Todd, Nick, Samantha, Victoria, Vanessa, Maxx, and Zara,
May you find and love and be loved by worthy people who make your life bigger and better and wonderful, beyond your greatest dreams.
May you be forever blessed in every way.
With all my love, Mom / DS
Dear Friends,
Mother’s Day is my favourite holiday of the year. With nine children, it is a Big Deal at our house! And it’s a chance to celebrate not only our mothers, but the women we love and admire who have been role models for us. I hope you will be celebrated today.
Worthy Opponents was fun to write, about two good people in opposition in business, but who admire each other and enhance each others’ lives with lessons learned and challenging situations faced.
And thank you above all for faithfully reading the books. You mean so much to me, and I am always grateful to you – every day!
With much love,
Danielle
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.