Daddy's Girls Read online

  Daddy’s Girls 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 © 2020 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 and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399179624

  Ebook ISBN 9780399179631

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  Cover images: (background) Ron and Patty Thomas/E+/Getty Images; (foreground) Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Moment/Getty Images; (women on horses) Ascent Xmedia/Taxi/Getty Images

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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

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Dedication

  By Danielle Steel

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The sky was just beginning to lighten and there were birds singing when Kate Tucker got up at four-thirty on a May morning, as she did every day. A tall, leggy blonde, she unwound herself from the sheets, and went to get a cup of coffee. Her days were long and started early, working on her father’s ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley. They had moved there from Texas thirty-eight years before, when she was four years old. Her mother had died the year before, a few months after her youngest sister, Caroline, was born. Her father was a ranch hand. He had decided to come to California with his meager savings, his truck, and his three little girls, Kate, Gemma, who was a year younger than Kate, and Caroline, who was one.

  Jimmy Tucker, JT, had heard about the Santa Ynez Valley, and it sounded like heaven to him. He had gotten a job on a modest but respected ranch, and had brought his experience and skill from Texas. He was only twenty-six years old then, and quickly proved his worth to the ranch owner who had given him a chance, and a cabin for him and his three little girls to live in. The foreman’s wife ran her own daycare in town, and had given Jimmy a “family discount” for his girls. And her teenage daughters sometimes babysat for him when he had to work at night.

  It had been rugged at first trying to make ends meet. There was never any money for anything extra. He got their clothes in the hand-me-down basket at their church, and some of the other ranch hands’ wives gave him whatever their children had outgrown. He managed to feed and house his daughters, and worked hard at his job. He saved every penny he could, thinking of the future. Jimmy Tucker was a man with dreams, and the rancher he worked for thought he would go far. He had a fire in his belly like few men his boss had known.

  Kate didn’t remember the hard times in the beginning, and neither did her sisters. When the foreman retired four years after they’d arrived, JT was made foreman, at thirty, and ran the ranch. And when the owner died ten years later, he left a decent sized piece of land to Jimmy, which he had added to over the years. Now, at sixty-four, Jimmy owned ten thousand acres, and the most successful ranch in the Valley. They raised cattle, bred horses, and had a small dairy. And at forty-two, Kate helped him run it. She had grown up on a horse and in her father’s shadow.

  Jimmy couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in the world, nor could Kate. She had everything she wanted right here, a beautiful place, a job she loved, and she liked working with her father, though he wasn’t easy. He was larger than life, and had a powerful personality. He valued what she did for him, but rarely said so. He was a man of few words, but he knew how to run a ranch better than anyone in the county, and had taught her everything she knew. They had thirty-five employees on the ranch, who respected her just as they did JT.

  Pleasing him was all-important to her, but earning his praise wasn’t easy. He rarely acknowledged how hard she worked. She was an important part of his operation, and she knew it. She was a born country girl, unlike both her younger sisters, who had fled, Gemma at eighteen to L.A., and Caroline for college.

  Caroline was a beautiful blonde, smaller than her two older sisters. She was thirty-nine, three years younger than Kate, married, and had two children. Neither Kate nor Gemma was married. Caroline had gone to UC Berkeley to get a teaching degree, and stayed on to get a master’s in English literature. She’d started writing young adult books in grad school to make ends meet, while working as a teacher and a waitress. She made a respectable living now with her books.

  It was the life Caroline had longed for growing up and her father and sisters had never understood. She had an unquenchable thirst for books, knowledge, and culture, none of which was available in the Valley, or not to the degree she wanted. She read everything she could lay hands on, while Kate had a natural instinct for horses and learned everything she could about the ranch. All Gemma wanted was to leave and go to Hollywood. They each had their own passions and Caroline’s were totally foreign to her sisters. It set her apart from her family, and made her feel like a stranger in their midst from the time she was very young. She learned to read at five and had been a voracious reader ever since. She dreamed of doing and seeing the things she read about, and of writing herself.

  Now at thirty-nine, she lived in Marin County outside San Francisco, with her husband, Peter, and their two children. She had met Peter at Berkeley when she was in college and he was in business school. He was five years older, from a family with money. Peter had grown up with all the cultural advantages she had missed. He had made a considerable fortune of his own in venture capital. Caroline and Peter were the typical successful Marin County couple. He drove a Porsche, she drove a Mercedes station wagon. They had a handsome house and two bright, nice kids who went to private schools. Their daughter, Morgan, was fifteen, and Billy was eleven. Caroline loved their life, her work, and their marriage.

  She had snuck away while her father wasn’t looking. Gemma, his middle child, had always been the star in his eyes, and Kate, the oldest, was the daughter he counted on to back him, and work with him on the ranch. Caroline never gave him a hard time about anything. He and Gemma fought constantly, but he loved and respected her all the more for it. While he and Gemma were battling, Caroline just quietly slipped away to the life she had fantasized about for years. She had everything she wanted now, a solid marriage, great kids, a pretty house. She was involved with the ballet, the film festival in Marin, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a career she enjoyed. She was still writing young adult books, and had won the coveted Printz Award, the most prestigious award for books for younger readers.

  She had been starving for culture while she lived in the Valley, and all her hopes had come to fruition once she left Santa Ynez. She went back as rarely as possible, and occasionally felt guilty about it. She loved her father and sister, but found visiting the ranch oppressive. Just being there made he
r feel anxious. It was a déjà vu of her youth, which wasn’t a happy memory for her. She had felt overlooked and out of place for all seventeen years she’d lived there until she left for college.

  Peter was from New York and they visited his family more often than hers, although her kids thought it was fun to go to the ranch. Caroline loved going to New York, catching up on the latest museum exhibits, the opera, theater, and everything that the city offered. She took her children with her whenever possible.

  They thought their maternal grandfather was a colorful person, full of charm, and a real cowboy. He had ridden in the rodeo when he was younger, and done well. He had even survived being gored by a bull in a roping contest, which fascinated her children. But they saw very little of him. Caroline, Peter, and the children usually had something else to do. She had quietly disconnected from her own family in every significant way over the years. It was just better for her, and Peter didn’t press her about it. He wasn’t fond of the ranch either, and he knew how much she hated going home, which gave him a valid excuse not to go there and to discourage her from going. She hadn’t been back in three years.

  In the early days of their relationship, Peter had teased Caroline mercilessly about growing up on a ranch. He called her a cowgirl, and referred to her “redneck origins” until she finally told him how it hurt her and got him to stop. It had taken years to win his parents’ respect, and they made it obvious that they would have preferred it if he had married someone from their world. In time, they came to appreciate her value, and how much she loved their son. Their acceptance had been hard won.

  Peter valued her intelligence, good judgment, sound advice, and solid values too. But in heated moments, the difference in how they had grown up still caused them to clash. She wasn’t a New Yorker and didn’t have the sophisticated upbringing he did, but she was a loving mother and a wonderful wife. The rare times he called her a cowgirl now were meant only to ruffle her feathers, not to wound her, although sometimes it still did anyway. She wasn’t proud of her origins and still sorely felt the opportunities she had missed in Santa Ynez, with a father and two sisters who thought intellectual pursuits were a waste of time. She had more than made up for it as an adult.

  * * *

  —

  Gemma didn’t go home much more often than Caroline did. She had gone to L.A. as soon as she’d graduated from high school, without bothering with college. She was a striking, tall, beautiful, exotic-looking woman with dark hair and blue eyes. She’d done some modeling, paid for acting lessons herself, and started out with small parts on TV. At thirty-one, she had landed the starring role in a successful TV series, and was still firmly ensconced there. Now forty-one, she had had her eyes done, and enough Botox shots and fillers to look ten years younger than she was, with makeup and good lighting. She never seemed to age on the show or in real life. She was very decidedly a star, and lived that way, with a gorgeous house and pool in the Hollywood Hills, and a glamorous life. She had dated some of the best-known Hollywood bachelors, and fallen seriously in love once. Her romances were usually brief and tumultuous, and were reported in the tabloids. Her one serious love had left her for a more famous actress and broken her heart. She had kept things light ever since, never caring deeply for the men in her life. She was more dedicated to her career than to anything else. Her father loved reading about her, no matter what the papers said. Gemma could do no wrong in JT’s eyes, though their battles were legendary and fierce. They were too much alike to get along, headstrong, stubborn, and determined to have their own way. Neither Gemma nor Kate had ever married, and Gemma claimed she didn’t care. She was having too much fun to get tied down, once she got over her one and only broken heart. Kate worked too hard to meet a man and spend time with him. She was at her father’s beck and call on the ranch day and night. If anything went wrong, he called her, at any hour.

  Their father liked to say that he had a workhorse in Kate, Gemma was his star, and Caroline was the brain and suburban housewife, once she grew up. He never understood her life or her interests, and didn’t try, but he was impressed by her husband’s success, and he thought his grandchildren were great. They were smart and inquisitive and loved his stories when he occasionally saw them. He never went to San Francisco. He never left the Valley. He was always working. He loved it.

  JT Tucker was a cowboy to the depths of his soul, and so was Kate. She worked hard to be the son he’d never had. She had lived up to all his expectations, even if he didn’t acknowledge it often. She lived for one thing, to please him. Her life in the Santa Ynez Valley suited her to perfection. When she was younger, she assumed she’d marry, but as time went on, the men she dated fell by the wayside. They wanted more than she had to give. Her father and the ranch consumed all her energy and time. She was always canceling dates or standing men up to tend to a sick horse, help deliver a calf, or because her father insisted he needed her help with a project only she could do. It got harder and harder to explain, and eventually she stopped trying. She was married to the ranch now. Her father expected it and didn’t realize what a sacrifice she’d made for him. It was what he expected of her. And she loved her father, the ranch, and the valley where they lived, with her whole heart and soul, more than she’d ever loved any man. The men in her life had gone on to marry other women, while her father continued to depend on her.

  By six o’clock in the morning, she would be on a horse and stay there for most of the day, checking on their fences, watching what went on at the breeding barn, riding across the fields, helping to plan their livestock auctions. There was no aspect of their business that she wasn’t involved in or knowledgeable about. It was a large operation, with bunkhouses for twenty-five of their thirty-five employees.

  JT had no intention of retiring. He was a strong, vital man. He was a good father, as long as you did what he said, and agreed with him. Except for Gemma, who never did. He would never have tolerated the same behavior from Caroline or Kate. He had never hidden the fact that Gemma had been “Daddy’s Girl” all her life, and still was. No one could match her looks or glamour when she showed up at the ranch. As much as it was foreign to him, he loved that she was a TV star. Despite the fact that Caroline was successful writing young adult books that were lucrative and admired, the value of what she did went right over his head. Writing for kids seemed irrelevant to him. But Caroline had never hungered for his praise, as Kate had. Instead she had sought freedom, and found it at Berkeley, and then in Marin County as a wife and mother. Peter and her kids were proud of her, that was enough. She always said that her father was a narcissist. Gemma didn’t disagree with her. It was all about him.

  None of them remembered their mother, although Kate thought she had some dim early memories from when she was three. She was never sure if she remembered her from the occasional mention of her, or the photograph of her that was in each of their bedrooms. The others weren’t old enough when she died to have recollections of their mother, and their father didn’t like talking about her. He never dwelled on the past. He tried valiantly to be both mother and father to his girls when they were growing up, and succeeded, some times better than others. Gemma gave him credit for that, but he had been more generous about spending time with her than with the others. She had been a gorgeous child. Kate was shyer, and avoided the spotlight, and Caroline simply didn’t comment or speak up. She was almost always silent. She kept her opinions to herself. All she wanted now was to lead a good life and be the perfect wife and mother.

  She supported Peter in everything he did, listened avidly to his plans and problems, and gave him sound advice. She tried to be the kind of mother she would have liked to have and didn’t, because of her mother’s death. She wondered about her parents’ early life in Texas sometimes. Their father made no secret of the fact that they had been poor, and it had been a wild bet on his part to come to California with three little girls and no job lined up, but he had always managed to
work things out, and provide for them. Handsomely, later on.

  JT was an only child with no living family when they left Texas. He said the memories there were too painful for him once Scarlett died. He wanted a fresh start, and he got one for all of them. In California, he managed with the foreman’s wife’s daycare. He cooked for them himself when he got home at night. And the girls learned early to be self-sufficient and take care of each other. They had suffered at times from not having a mother, but he hadn’t suffered from not having a wife. For a long time, his girls and his work were enough for him. He cooked breakfast for them every morning, bathed them, spent time with them whenever possible, and taught them all to ride.

  Gemma was a capable rider but hadn’t ridden in ten years, except briefly in movies and in ads. Caroline had been terrified of horses all her life. Only Kate had his natural talent for horses. She was as solid in the saddle as any cowboy on the ranch, and had ridden in the local rodeo herself when she was younger, and enjoyed it. She was too busy for the rodeo now, and she couldn’t afford the time off if she got hurt. Her father had taught her to rope steers as a young girl, and she was good at that too. She had the eye and the timing, but she’d stayed off the broncos that he had always loved. Gemma called him a born show-off, to his face. No one else would have dared. One of Kate’s biggest thrills was when she was the rodeo queen one year. It allowed her to demonstrate her riding skills, but be seen as a girl. Her father thought it was silly, but was proud of her anyway.

  Kate had gone to college, because her high school teachers said she should. She’d gone to a state university, and hated it. Her father said it was a waste of time, and he needed her on the ranch. Kate missed her father, the ranch, and her sisters the whole time she was there. Gemma skipped college entirely and left for L.A. during Kate’s sophomore year. Caroline had gone to Berkeley at the start of Kate’s senior year. Kate couldn’t wait to get home when she graduated, and never left again.