A glamorous new novel from Danielle Steel, whose countless #1 <New York Times <bestselling novels have made her one of America’s favorite storytellers.

Autorentext

Danielle Steel has been hailed as one of the world’s bestselling authors, with a billion copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include Never Too Late, Upside Down, The Ball at Versailles, Second Act, Happiness, Palazzo, The Wedding Planner, and other highly acclaimed novels. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina’s life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; Expect a Miracle, a book of her favorite quotations for inspiration and comfort; Pure Joy, about the dogs she and her family have loved; and the children’s books Pretty Minnie in Paris and Pretty Minnie in Hollywood.

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A loving mother and successful fashion designer struggles to keep her family together and her business afloat in this gripping novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel.

After working as head designer for Oscar de la Renta, Eugenia Ward started her own company when she turned forty, fourteen years ago. She is now a major name in evening gowns and wedding gowns, ready-to-wear and haute couture. But with the fashion business in major downturn, she has recently suffered heavy losses, and Eugenia desperately needs new investors—and new ideas.

At the same time, she is the matriarch and guiding light for her five adult children, a single mother for more than a decade, since her divorce from the spendthrift Italian prince she’d married young. As the family gathers for a summer vacation at a beach house, wedding plans for her daughter Gloria are ballooning in expense even as the loutish behavior of Gloria’s fiancé causes Eugenia to question her daughter’s judgment. Meanwhile, Gloria’s sister Daphne is due to deliver twins right around the wedding date . . . which is also very close make or break New York Fashion Week.

The silver lining in it all may be meeting Patrick Hughes, a successful real estate developer who’s also going through a rough patch. A brilliant and creative businessman, Patrick gives her valuable advice about her business challenges. Eugenia finds friendship with Patrick sailing on his yacht and starts to imagine a new beginning, independent of her roles as mother and entrepreneur. But as the family gathers for the big wedding, tensions are running high, money may be running out, and a hurricane is looming on the horizon.

Danielle Steel’s glamorous and gripping novel offers an inspiring portrait of a strong and determined woman who rises to meet life’s challenges with fortitude, creativity, and love.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Eugenia Ward had spent the morning minutely going over her personal accounts and all her accounting records online, the same records that had been causing her endless anxiety and sleepless nights for the last eighteen months, ever since the pandemic began. She was a tall, slim, blond, serious-­looking woman, impeccably trained as a fashion designer, and had been in the business for thirty-­three years. She checked her accounts diligently, while making notes on a yellow legal pad of things she wanted to move and change and watch out for, expenses she could carve out of her overhead, and others she would eliminate from her life if she was forced to. It had been a long, slow process as she did everything to keep her business afloat. She was divorced with five adult children, two of whom she still helped to support. She had started her own company fourteen years before, when she turned forty. She made the most elegant, luxurious evening gowns and wedding gowns. They were ready-­to-­wear that looked like haute couture. They were worthy of the finest design houses and high-­end labels in Europe and the U.S., and a year after she’d opened the doors of her Eugenia Ward stores, she added another dimension, her own haute couture line of evening and wedding gowns, which was her dream come true. They were made to order, entirely by hand, in her own ateliers by sewers who had been trained in Paris. Like some of the finest French designers, she now created both ready-­to-wear clothes and haute couture. Her made-­to-­order handmade gowns were shown, ordered, and fitted in her exclusive private salons. She made it a memorable experience for her clients.

Her business had been a brilliant success and had taken off like a rocket, and much to everyone’s amazement, Eugenia had been able to pay off her investors in five years. She had loyal clients around the world, and had had several offers to buy the business, but she had always refused. Both arms of the business were a gold mine, and she loved what she did. Eugenia was involved in every aspect of the business, with her haute couture gowns made under the label Princess Eugenie and her ready-­to-­wear line eponymous, as Eugenia Ward.

As a respected American designer, she showed her next season’s line of ready-­to-­wear gowns at Fashion Week in New York twice a year, in February and September, and her haute couture line in Paris, with the other remaining couture houses, in January and July. She had a store in the Seventies on Madison Avenue in New York for her ready-­to-­wear gowns, and above it her very elegant haute couture salons, where they had fittings. She also had an office on Seventh Avenue where they took ready-­to-­wear orders. She had a store on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and a business office above it for orders in Europe. It was an impeccably run operation, and extremely lucrative for Eugenia. Until the pandemic hit them like a bomb. The entire world had been in lockdown for months, repeatedly, and curfews were in force around the globe. Social events, even small dinner parties, were canceled, as well as every socialite jet-­set wedding. No woman in any city in any country had worn an evening gown in almost two years. Evening wear and the events where one wore it had vanished overnight. Eugenia was one of the most famous and successful designers in fashion history and poured much of what she made back into the business, and in the blink of an eye, she had become obsolete. Now women were wearing yoga pants, exercise clothes, blue jeans and sweatshirts, fleece-­lined slippers and running shoes, and down jackets instead of satin evening coats. Their jewelry to go with the evening clothes had been in vaults at home or the bank for almost two years, and the calendars of the most popular socialites were blank.

Eugenia hadn’t arrived at the pinnacle of her success by accident or casually. Her father had wanted her to get a law degree, and her mother thought she should study art history and work at the Louvre in Paris or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Her parents were serious, conservative, well-­educated people from respectable families. Her mother had gone to Vassar, her father to Yale. Her mother had never worked. She played bridge, served on charitable committees, and oversaw their only daughter’s education and well-­being. They were good parents. Her father was the president of a New York bank, and both came from solid but not wealthy families. Her mother had gotten a master’s in Renaissance art at Columbia, and painted still-­lifes and landscapes in the style of the Old Masters as a well-­executed hobby. The walls of the Park Avenue apartment where Eugenia had grown up were covered with her mother’s art.

Eugenia had been passionate about fashion all her life. It fascinated her, particularly the glamorous gowns created for movie stars and famous women. Creating them hers…