The Award by Danielle Steel

Author:Danielle Steel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Robert was nervous about the baby’s health initially and brought in a pediatric cardiologist to check her for the defect his first daughter had died of, but Dominique was fine.

After her week’s stay at the hospital, Gaëlle and Robert brought the baby home with the formally trained nanny they had hired to care for her. Gaëlle would have preferred taking care of the baby herself, but Robert still wanted to have time alone with her, and to travel with her, and having a nanny for the baby made more sense, but it left Gaëlle with time on her hands that she didn’t know what to do with, and she needed to be around to nurse her on demand anyway.

She and Robert talked about her going back to work, but Gaëlle found she didn’t want to once the baby arrived. It would be hard to limit how much she worked, with overzealous modeling agencies, magazines, and advertising clients, and she was afraid she’d never see Robert and the baby, or not enough, and she was more attached to the baby than she’d expected. So two months after Dominique was born, she told her agency that she had retired. She had enjoyed modeling, and it had been exciting and fun, and had been a godsend for her in Paris right after the war, but she had a husband and child and demanding home life now, and she was ready to give up her career. She was twenty-two years old but had moved into another phase of her life. She fully realized how fortunate she was and never took it for granted.

She missed her mother at times, and wished she could have seen the baby. It seemed sad that she had no grandparents and no other relatives, but Robert more than made up for it. He adored the baby, and although he worried about her health unduly because of his first bad experience, she became the joy of his life, and whenever he was home, he carried her everywhere, talked to her, read her books when she was old enough to understand them, put her to bed at night, and was frantic when she got sick. Gaëlle loved being with her too, and loved her deeply. But Dominique was Robert’s passion, and greatest treasure. And as she got older, she could do no wrong in her father’s eyes. He was blind to any misbehavior, and when her mother scolded her, or Nanny, she ran to her father to “save” her, and he would cancel any punishment they had meted out, however slight. She was his little princess and ruled the house and everyone in it, which Gaëlle did not approve of. She had far more traditional European ideas about childrearing, and her parents had been quite strict. Robert forbade it.

“How can I ever make her behave if you spoil her all the time?” Gaëlle complained, but her pleas to him were futile. Robert didn’t want Dominique punished, chastised, or disciplined, or even scolded.

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