“You mean, read it to you while you eat?” Piper asked.

He glanced over at Jane and winked. “That would be great. I’d love a chicken salad sandwich.”

“You bet, boss.”

He shut the door and turned back.

“Wow,” Jane said. “She’s very… patient.”

Oliver chuckled. “Well, I’m sure I’m getting ham and cheese. Or a salad. Likely with kale. And when she reads it to me it will be with embellishments like ‘... and if some dumbass thinks he can touch your ass while at work, you have every right to stab him in the back of the hand with a letter opener,’ but it will be far more entertaining than reading through it myself.”

“Ollie is basically a huge child, and he doesn’t like to work alone at his desk,” Dax said.

“Oh, hey, pot, I’m kettle,” Ollie said.

Dax just shrugged.

Jane wondered how Piper managed to not stab both of them with letter openers.

“So… can we get on with… whatever this is?” she asked. After witnessing all this, she wasn’t at all surprised Dax would be asking her out in front of Ollie. “I really do have work to do downstairs.”

Aiden came into the room just then. “So what’s going on with this meeting with Jane?” he asked.

“Just waiting for you,” Dax said.

They’d been waiting for Aiden? Jane frowned. He wanted Aiden to witness this too? Dax definitely seemed like the grand-gesture type, but this was a little ridiculous.

“He hasn’t been at all,” Ollie told Aiden. “He’s been sexually harassing Jane.”

Aiden looked at Jane quickly. “What?” He frowned. “He has?” He turned his frown on Dax. “What the hell?”

“He hasn’t,” Jane said quickly. She was sure Aiden knew Dax well and surely wouldn’t believe that of his friend, but she also knew Aiden would be protective of her.

Aiden was a good guy. And Dax was clearly… a goofball? That wasn’t exactly the word she wanted to use. He was fun, as Piper had put it. He was playful and irreverent. Those were maybe more accurate. She also knew Aiden was trying very hard to make this new shift in management at Hot Cakes a good move for everyone, and he was taking it seriously. Someone like Dax could probably be annoying to someone who took things seriously and wanted to buckle down and just focus on work.

Or maybe that was just her.

Aiden looked at her. “Everything is fine?”

“Totally fine.” Then she looked at Dax. “At least, so far.” She still wasn’t sure how she was going to handle Dax asking her out. She should turn him down. For sure. But she didn’t really want to.

Aiden looked at Dax too. “So why is Jane here?”

Oliver also looked at Dax. “Yes, Dax, please fill us in.”

“I invited Jane up to discuss an idea I had,” Dax said.

Oh boy. Half of her was very nervous about this. The other half really wanted to know all his ideas that involved the two of them. That was trouble.

Though she really wasn’t sure she needed Oliver’s and Aiden’s input on any of those ideas.

He was a hot, charming millionaire who clearly got his way a lot of the time. What the hell was she doing even thinking about flirting with him? Not to mention actually flirting with him? Because she had been. A little. And entertaining the idea of pasta and cake pops.

Damn. Just an hour ago she’d been entertaining the idea of cake pops with him, even while knowing that was a bad idea, and now she’d added pasta to it all.

“What idea?” Jane asked when no one else did.

Really, wasn’t that where Aiden or Oliver could have jumped in?

“I want you to be my boss for a week.”

She lifted a brow. Was that an innuendo about the bedroom? He wanted her to be a dominatrix or something? Because she wasn’t doing that. She had no energy for leather and whips and sex swings. “I don’t think so.”

“No, really, it’s great,” Dax insisted. “You show me up close and in personal how the factory works.”

“The factory?” She frowned. “Wait, you want to work in the factory?”

“It’s the best way to learn all about the company from the inside out,” Dax said. “I need to get down there with the people who do it every day. Reading reports and listening to management can only get us so far.”

“And you want me to be your boss on the factory floor?”

“Absolutely.”

Yeah, he might not have meant it in a dominatrix way initially, but there was something flirtatious and innuendo-ish in his tone now.

But in regards to the factory, this was a terrible idea.

Well, it was a terrible idea in the leather-and-whips way too. Actually it was an even worse idea in the whip way. She really didn’t have the energy for that.

She was pretty sure she didn’t have the energy for Dax, period.

But she couldn’t have him work in the factory with her. She wasn’t anyone’s boss. No one freaking listened to her. Not her father when she told him he had to go to physical therapy every day. Not her stepmother when Jane told her to lay off her little sister, Kelsey. Not Kelsey when Jane told her a C in English wasn’t good enough. She didn’t even try to boss anyone around at work.

“In other words, you’re tired of sitting in an office and talking to only us all day,” Aiden said to Dax.

“There’s that too,” Dax agreed, without looking the least bit sheepish.

“This isn’t a terrible idea though,” Oliver said, nodding thoughtfully.

Oh, it was a terrible idea.

“He’s got a point,” Ollie went on. “We do want to know how everything works. We know everything about Fluke because we built it from the ground up. Everything that happens is there because we made it happened as we went along.”

“What’s Fluke?” Jane inserted.

“Our company name is Fluke Inc.,” Aiden told her. “That’s the parent company our game and all the merchandising and everything falls under.”

“We called it that because it was a total fluke that the game took off and that we were even remotely successful,” Dax said with a grin.

“It’s a constant reminder that we basically got lucky, and we still have to work to keep things going,” Ollie added.

She liked that.

“Ollie’s right,” Dax said. “We know everything about Fluke because we created it. We need to know Hot Cakes that well.”

“The Lancasters owned this company for fifty years, and they didn’t know all the ins and outs,” Jane said. “I can promise you Eric Lancaster has never pushed one button or pulled one lever in that factory or in the warehouse.”

“Well, we want to be better than the Lancasters,” Aiden said firmly. “We will be better.” He looked at Dax. “This is a pretty good idea.”

Oh, it really wasn’t.

“I know,” Dax said.

Jane gave a little snort and shook her head. He said it as if it was the most obvious thing that his idea was good.

“It is,” Ollie said. “I wouldn’t mind learning a few things about how the factory functions and getting to know some of our new employees.”