Worthy Opponents(32)
“You could lose your business one day and go under, because of the changes you’re not willing to make now.” He was trying to scare her, but it was also a real possibility.
“We’ve been in business for seventy-three years. I figure we might last a while longer, doing things our way. My grandfather taught me to fight for what I believe in, and that’s what I’m doing every day. I’d love to have your money to make some big improvements here. But not at the price I’d have to pay. I might as well sell you the store outright today, instead of waiting two years to have you take control of it then.”
“That would be a possibility too,” he said. He wasn’t trying to insult her. This was business, and he was a smart businessman. He was looking for the best deal to serve his own interests, not hers, and she knew it.
“You would ruin it,” she said, standing. “The store isn’t for sale, Mike, and I don’t want a majority partner. I think we’re done here.” He stood up and looked at her regretfully. Once he knew her, he had suspected it would come to this. “Thank you for the offer, which I gratefully decline.”
“Let me know if you change your mind,” he said.
“I won’t,” she said, and he walked to the door and closed it quietly behind him. There was no deal to be made.
Mike advised his team that afternoon of the outcome of the meeting with Spencer.
“There’s no deal possible,” he told them simply. “She won’t give up control.”
“She needs the money,” Joe Weiss said, “or it’ll strangle itself eventually. If she can’t expand, it’ll just die on the vine.”
“She won’t let it. At worst, it’ll stay an unusual specialty store, the way it always has been. She doesn’t want the kind of expansion we’re offering her, or what it would cost her in control. In a way, I admire her. She’s a gutsy woman. She has a dream, and she won’t give up on it. It’s a legacy she’s guarding with her life. For us, there’s no deal possible. We need to move on. Let’s look at that high-volume, low-cost brand we were considering in the Southwest. Brooke’s is over for us,” he said firmly, but as they moved on to other possible investments, Mike felt strangely sad to let Brooke’s go. He wanted to help her, and he had no excuse to see Spencer anymore. He had only seen her four times in his life and he already knew that he had never admired anyone as much. She was an honorable woman to the very depths of her soul. She brought out the best in him, and he was going to miss her.
Spencer was thinking of Mike too after he left the store. There had been no surprises in what he said to her. What he described was exactly what she had feared and had rejected all along. What he had suggested made total sense for him, and none for her, unless she wanted to change Brooke’s completely. But it had been an honest offer for someone who wanted to get rid of the burdens and responsibilities of the store, which she didn’t. She loved the store to the very core of her being, like a person or a child. She was glad she had met Mike Weston. She recognized that he was a very special man, but there was no way she would ever do business with him, and make a deal. For Spencer, the dream she had was still intact and worth fighting for.
Chapter 7
Mike was testy and on edge for the week after Spencer had turned down his offer. He wasn’t surprised, since he recognized that the deal was stacked in his favor, but he was disappointed. He realized now how unrealistic he had been, trying to talk her into it. She was never going to accept his offer, and she had said so all along. She was above all an honest woman. He admired her more than he had expected to, and in particular her passion about what she believed in. She set herself impossible goals and expected to live up to them. He respected her all the more for that. And now he had no reason to speak to her. He was startled to realize he missed her.
He had had arguments with his entire research team that week, which was unlike him. He was usually even-tempered and good-natured, but he wasn’t now. He was irritated by the other investments they presented to him. They all seemed lackluster and uninteresting, and nothing to get excited about, even if they were likely to be profitable. Ridiculous as it seemed, even to him, he missed Spencer, a woman he barely knew, who had her own life and problems to deal with.
He often wondered how she was faring with the repairs after the fire, and wished he could have helped her. There was no question that a large influx of money from him would have made everything easier for her, but there was no way he could make a deal, and such a small one by his standards, without having majority control. He hoped that she understood that and that it wasn’t personal. He had been completely up front with her, as he always was. She had been as well, refusing to sell her family legacy to a stranger who would then control it, no matter how efficiently. One day it would no longer be her company, or her family’s, it would be his. Her grandfather had passed her the baton, and there was no way she would drop it or abandon it. It was to her credit, in his opinion, that she had stuck to her guns, so any deal between them was impossible, no matter how much fun it might have been to work on it with her. An investment of that size, for him, would have been a sidebar. But he did love the store, and admired how she ran it. There was so much he admired about her, and now she was lost from sight. He would have felt like a fool admitting that he missed her. He barely knew her. But she had haunted him since they met. He loved the contrast between the glamorous way she looked at the Met party, and seeing her in jeans with her disheveled hair and her smudged face the night of the fire. She was a real person.