The Portrait - Hardcover

Steel, Danielle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593498763 ISBN 13: 9780593498767

Verlag: Delacorte Pr, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A gifted portrait artist and a high-powered subject confront past wounds to embrace new love in this poignant novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel.

Devon Darcy’s reputation precedes her. As a highly sought-after portrait artist, she seems to have the ability to peer into the souls of her subjects and then capture them on canvas. But the world doesn’t know about the devastating losses she has endured, first as an orphan, then as a far-too-young widow.

When entrepreneur Charles Mackenzie Taylor sees her at a New York gallery event, he is instantly haunted by her beauty and her talent. Having lost his mother when he was thirteen, and still living in the cold shadow of his late banker father’s disapproval, Charlie has given up on love. He’s resigned himself to a loveless marriage to avoid the inconvenience of divorce.

But Devon awakens something in him across that crowded gallery, and she is in turn intrigued by Charlie. He approaches her to paint his portrait, and while her schedule is booked for many months before she can accommodate him, with the electricity between them palpable.

When they encounter each other over the summer in the Hamptons, their connection deepens as they each release years of pent-up emotions and unfulfilled longing. But the ghosts of their pasts are not easily put to rest. Charlie wrestles with his fear of real intimacy for the first time in his life, while Devon struggles with her fear of abandonment. And after an accident endangers Devon’s career, they must decide together what their future holds.

Danielle Steel’s sensitive portrait of two successful people who have built walls around themselves is a wise chronicle of the rocky path to true courage and connection.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 Trial by Fire, Triangle, Joy, Resurrection, Only the Brave, Upside Down, The Ball at Versailles, 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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Chapter 1

The Grace Cathedral choir in San Francisco was singing “Amazing Grace” as Charles Mackenzie Taylor stood at his father’s funeral, letting his thoughts drift to the familiar music. It was a beautiful warm June day. His father, Patrick Taylor, had been a fierce and bold leader, greatly respected in the community, head of Golden State Bank, which his own grandfather had founded, and which three generations of Taylor men had owned and run. It had been one of the largest commercial banks in California since the Gold Rush days. Patrick had died at eighty-five after a year-long bout with cancer. He was a force to be reckoned with and a hard man to please. He had continued to go to the office until his last few months, and the bank was officially run by a highly experienced CEO and a competent staff, overseen by a board of directors, of which Patrick had been chairman.

Charles was Patrick’s only child, brilliant in his own right, with no interest whatsoever in the family bank or the world of finance, unlike all his male ancestors before him. He would be the first Taylor heir who would never run the bank, although out of a sense of duty and a recent promise to his father, he had agreed to step into his father’s shoes as chairman of the board, which he dreaded. Several members of the board were close to his father’s age, had conservative, antiquated ideas, and took rigid positions on most things, and Charles found them as difficult to get along with as his father had been. The rest of the board were CEOs of large companies, leaders of the financial community, and included two women, one of whom was the widow of one of their largest investment clients, and the other of whom ran a hedge fund. They all had the right credentials, very little imagination, if any, and no desire to do anything innovative. Charles felt as though he couldn’t breathe whenever he walked into his father’s office. They had never gotten along. It was no secret that Patrick had never approved of him, and now Charles had to run the board.

At forty-nine, Charles had been a renegade all his life, with a passion for new ideas and an unfailing instinct for the needs and trends of the future. Despite the trust he had been left by his grandparents and his father, he had made his own fortune doing what he loved, starting new businesses. His education had been almost identical to his father’s, but Charlie had done entirely different things with his. He had attended Princeton as an undergraduate, then Harvard Business School in the entrepreneurial program, which Patrick said was unnecessary, with a bank to run. Charlie had started to build his future as a junior at Princeton, when he created a delivery service for fellow students, bringing them everything from food to medicine and pharmaceutical needs, including industrial quantities of condoms, and eventually branching out to deliver everything from mattresses to office equipment. He expanded his business model through friends at other universities, and eventually had nearly a hundred branches throughout the United States. He sold the business for what even his father considered an astounding amount of money. It was one of the earliest and most successful startups, and set the bar high for others who followed in his footsteps with their own startups. The concept was simple and it worked. During the years he was growing the business, Charlie’s father referred to him as The Delivery Boy, and was furious when the business kept Charlie from taking his place at the bank, and gave him an excuse not to. It took his father years to admit to himself that Charlie was never going to be a part of the family business, and that there had never been any hope of it. Charlie was destined to fly in his own skies, on wings broader than his father’s.

By the time Charlie got to business school, he was already a very rich man from the sale of his startup, not even considering his trusts. But he wanted the same credentials as his ancestors. He set up another startup, this time in healthier fast food, at first in the United States and eventually worldwide. It wasn’t an elegant, distinguished way to make a fortune, but it was extremely efficient. He hadn’t sold the company yet, had hung onto it for a long time and refused several offers, but it was ultimately his plan to sell. He would launch another startup afterward. He was thinking about that now and wasn’t sure which new direction he would take. He liked shiny new ideas that others hadn’t thought of yet. Simple ideas that worked. He had a passion for business. He had put his heart and soul into it. Business was his first love. He loved everything about it.

Being at his father’s funeral brought back memories of his mother. She had died when he was thirteen. His memories of her had faded now, but he remembered her as a beautiful, lovely, gentle, kind, loving woman, everything his father wasn’t. His father was cold and austere, unbending and unforgiving. He had never remarried. Three months after Charlie’s mother died, his father had sent him to St. Paul’s, a boarding school in the East and another family tradition. It was a long way from San Francisco, and no one ever visited him there. Charlie felt his mother’s absence acutely that first year. Time had helped heal the wound, but he had never really gone home again, except for short visits. After St. Paul’s, he had gone to Princeton, where he had stayed for an extra year to run his fledgling delivery business, and then gone on to Harvard Business School. His father had a large, handsome house in San Francisco, where Charlie had lived before he left for school and stayed during his visits, but after business school, Charlie had bought a very beautiful home in Atherton and set up offices in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, home to venture capital and many startups.

He had married young, on an impulse at twenty-six, when he was finishing business school for his MBA. He’d been dating Faye, a girl five years older than he was, from a family of bankers in New York. Her family was similar to his, though slightly less austere. She was an only child like him, and she was in the throes of a wildly rebellious stage. Once at Harvard, she dyed her hair purple, and they had fun together. She was smart, an outstanding law student, and wanted to save the world. They’d only been dating for a few months at school, on a boring holiday weekend, when Charlie convinced her to fly to Las Vegas with him. It sounded like a great idea. They got outrageously drunk, wound up at the Elvis Chapel, which they thought was hysterically funny, and woke up married. Predictably, neither family was pleased, and called them irresponsible. Both sets of parents wanted them to have the marriage annulled, but both families were respectable. Faye was incredibly smart and graduated from Harvard Law School at the top of her class, and she and Charlie decided to give the marriage a try. It worked for a while, but not for long. Her rebelliousness faded when they moved to California and she got a job at one of the most important venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Charlie had convinced her to come west and look for a job in tech when he went back to San Francisco. She turned into her parents almost immediately, with conservative views. Her purple hair disappeared, along with almost everything else he had liked about her. She thought fast food was beneath him, although it was earning him millions. She turned out to be critical and cold, instead of fun and sexy as she had been at Harvard. They were both considering divorce by the end of the first year, and regretting their rash leap into marriage, when Faye discovered she was pregnant, and they decided to stick with it.

Neither of them was thrilled at the prospect...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Delacorte Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593498763
• ISBN 13: 9780593498767
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland