Summary of Worthy Opponents a novel by Danielle Steel

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of Worthy Opponents a novel by Danielle Steel

 

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Danielle Steel's Worthy Opponents is a powerful novel about a woman running her family's luxury department store and the wealthy investor who threatens to take it over. Spencer Brooke is a divorced single mother of twin boys, and with the ever-evolving landscape of the fashion industry comes new challenges for her and the legacy she's inherited. Mike Weston is known for transforming small businesses into bigger, more successful ones, and Brooke's feels like the perfect opportunity. Spencer refuses to be tempted by Mike's offer, but when bad luck strikes, she is backed into a corner.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Mar 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215933688

Willie M. Joseph

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Chapter 1

Spencer Brooke was a small, trim woman with a subtle sense of style who was the owner and CEO of one of the most respected department stores in New York, Brooke and Son, more commonly known as Brooke's. She was the fourth generation of her family to be in the retail business, and had been since she was a child. Her grandfather, Thornton Brooke, told her that one day she would run the store, and she took special pride in it. Her father, Jeremiah, had established the largest, most successful department store in New York with his own inherited fortune in 1920, and when Jeremiah bought out his partner a year later, he kept the name. Jeremiah had an unfailing instinct for and attraction to retail, bringing in the highest quality merchandise from Europe and beautifully designed pieces from all the luxury brands in the States.

Thornton was nine when suddenly everything changed, and the family moved from their mansion on Fifth Avenue to a small apartment in Gramercy Park. Thornton's family lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929, which caused his grandfather's bank to close and his father to go to work at a men's haberdashery. The family had saved enough to send Thornton to college, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, he enlisted in the army and survived the invasion of Normandy. His father, Jeremiah, died of tuberculosis while Thornton was away at war, and Thornton returned to find his mother looking ancient and frail. During the war, Thornton dreamed of opening a store, not on the grand scale of the one they'd had, but something smaller and just as exclusive.

Thornton met Hannabel Phillips six months after he got back from Europe and was released by the army. They married in 1945 and their son, Tucker, was born on their first anniversary. Tucker was a strapping baby boy with an aptitude for math and a passion for finance. He had his ancestors' bankers' blood in his veins and none of the entrepreneurial retail blood of his grandfather Jeremiah or his father. Thorny was working two jobs during the week and a third on the weekends, and Hannabel was clever at helping him save his money.

Four years after Thorny had come home from the war, he had enough money to go to a bank and borrow the rest of what he needed to open a store. Brooke's was an institution in New York City, famous for its luxurious, elegant clothes for men and women. The store was on the fringes of a marginal neighborhood, but no one seemed to care about the location. The décor was avant-garde and up-to-date, and the most elegant society women in New York came to shop at Brooke's. Thornton and Hannabel were a team, with Thornton bringing samples home to ask her advice and her giving him her opinion on displays and merchandise.

Thornton built Brooke and Son into a booming business, and he fully expected his son, Tucker, to come into the business with him when he graduated from Princeton. Tucker married Eileen, a girl from an extremely restrained, conservative family in Boston, who had no interest in commerce. They waited until Eileen was nearly thirty-nine and Tucker nearly forty, after twelve years of marriage, to conceive their first child. They had been in no hurry to have children, but finally succumbed to social and familial pressure. The baby would be a son, and Thornton was thrilled at the prospect.

Tucker and Eileen were shocked when they were told their baby was a girl, and they named her Spencer. Spencer was beautiful and adored her grandparents, who were warm and loving. She was different from her parents and much more like her grandparents, and she loved helping out at the store as early as in her teens. She followed fashion trends closely and absorbed all the information her grandfather shared with her. She attended Parsons School of Design simultaneously with Eugene Lang College and majored in fashion administration.

She got her master's in business administration at Columbia and went to work at the store full-time. Thornton shared his secrets of success with his granddaughter, Spencer, and they had a great time together. He had forward-thinking ideas about marketing and merchandising, listened to his staff, and blended new ideas with old ones. He rejected the idea of moving the store to a better, fancier location uptown, as it would just make the store seem ordinary. He owned the building and had no desire to sell it and move. His advisors no longer challenged him about a move.

Thornton Brooke and his wife, Hannabel, had been married for sixty-seven years when Thornton had a massive stroke and died in his sleep the night before his ninety-second birthday. Everyone was devastated, even the employees, and Spencer couldn't imagine her life without him. Tucker was desperate to get out of the business he had hated all his life, but there was no one else to step into his father's shoes. Spencer's grandmother stopped coming to the store