“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.
He had his own problems too. He was worried about his son Zack floating around Europe. When was he going to get his act together and go back to school, and find a career path he wanted to pursue? Mike was tired of Maureen blaming him for putting too much pressure on his son. If he didn’t, who would? It was time for Zack to come home. He had been gone for eight months, and he seemed no closer to finding a direction than he had when he left. And Mike worried about him being so far away.
He’d been trying to reach Zack for three days, with no response, and complained about it to Maureen when he saw her in the kitchen one night, while they both dug in the fridge for something to eat for another dinner they wouldn’t eat together. He was tired of that too. There was a lot he was tired of these days. And Maureen’s constantly hostile, critical attitude was high on the list.
They sat down at the kitchen table at the same time, each with a salad. They no longer ate meals together, except if they turned up in the kitchen at the same time. And when they did, they rarely talked. More often than not, she read a book, or her texts, so she didn’t have to talk to him.
Their going to the Met party together had been a rare exception. They only did it because they didn’t want the people they knew socially to suspect that their marriage had fallen apart. Maureen had agreed to go, grudgingly and with a long face, but she was there.
“Have you heard from Zack?” he asked her when she sat down. “He’s not answering me. I don’t like it when he does that.”
“Then stop bugging him about going back to school,” she snapped at him. “Maybe then he’ll want to talk to you.”
“I asked him if he needed money. That usually works,” he said caustically. Mike had come to hate who he had become with Maureen. He had begun speaking to her the way she spoke to him, which was hateful. They brought out the worst in each other and had for years. Hers was because she was so bitter and resentful, and his responses were a reaction to hers. Whatever the reason, it was a miserable way to live, or treat another person, or be treated.
“He was going to Amsterdam after Munich,” she said in a more neutral tone.
“I don’t like his going there, with the ‘coffee shops.’ They’ll be stoned the whole time they’re there. It’s the only reason they wanted to go.”
“That’s not true. There are some wonderful museums there,” she said naively.
“You have more faith in our son than I do,” Mike said. “That’s a lot of temptation for three eighteen-year-olds. When are they going back to Paris, or London?”
“I don’t know. Soon,” she said. “That’s the whole point of his being there. He’s not on a schedule, and he doesn’t have to answer to us.” But Mike thought he did. He was just a kid.
“He needs to come home. Don’t you worry about him? I worry about him all the time.”
“That’s because you don’t have faith in our children,” she said, accusing him again. Whatever he did or said was always wrong.
“No. It’s because I was an eighteen-year-old boy once too. They do dumb stuff. And I was tamer than most.”
“So is he,” she said calmly. “If you’d just get off his back, he could prove it to you. He’s a great kid.”
“I know he is, but the world can be a dangerous place, especially today. And he’s far from home.”
“He’s done fine for eight months.” That much was true, but Mike worried anyway. He felt better when the kids were at home. He worried less about Jenny, in the regulated structure of Stanford, living in the dorm. She was more mature and less adventuresome than her brother, although they were only a year apart. “You know, you ruined Zack with all the pressure you put on him to achieve,” Maureen said, as Mike finished his salad and felt a fist clench in his stomach. He hated it when she said things like that. He felt instantly guilty, with a terror that she was right.
“I’m trying not to do that anymore,” Mike said quietly.
“It’ll take him years to recover, if he ever does.”
Mike couldn’t stand it anymore. Added to the malaise he was feeling over the deal with Spencer Brooke going sour, having Maureen heap guilt on him again over their children was just too much, and more than he could tolerate at the moment. He not only felt that he had failed his children, but he felt now as though he had failed Spencer because he couldn’t make the deal work for her.
“Are you talking about Zack or yourself?” he asked Maureen across the table. She hesitated before she answered.