6

“We don’t know,” Jane answered.

Aiden struggled to hide his expression. He wanted to slump in his chair and suck in a relieved breath. Instead, he gulped more lemonade.

“All we know is someone made an offer. It hasn’t been accepted or anything. We don’t know who it is. But Melissa told Nancy who told Taylor who told Brianna who told me that Eric got a call from a guy who said he wanted to buy Hot Cakes, and Eric was in a really good mood when he got off the phone.”

Eric Lancaster was Didi’s oldest son and president of Hot Cakes. Melissa was his executive assistant. Melissa was the mother of one of Aiden and Cam’s classmates. But that was as far as Aiden could follow the names. The rest didn’t really matter though. Eric was happy about the conversation. That was the key takeaway here. That was good. That meant there wasn’t another offer on the table. Yet. It meant Eric liked what he’d had had to say.

Aiden blew out a breath.

“Well, that sucks,” Zoe said.

Aiden frowned. “It does? Why?”

“Someone is keeping Hot Cakes alive,” she said. “Obviously, I was hoping that it would close and die.”

Aiden cast a look at Jane. She was chewing on her bottom lip.

“That’s not a very cool way to feel about your friend’s job, is it?”

Jane had started working for Hot Cakes part time after school in high school and had stayed on. She had certainly been bright enough and had the grades for college, but she had a complicated home life, and college hadn’t been a part of her plan. He remembered her telling him once that the more things could be simple and straightforward in her life—like a factory job that she knew inside and out and could depend on for decent money and benefits—the better.

“Jane knows how I feel,” Zoe said, frowning at him and then looking at Jane. She grabbed her friend’s hand. “I love Jane and want her to be happy, but she can do more than that factory. If they closed down, she’d be fine.”

“Are you happy the factory is staying open?” he asked Jane directly.

She squeezed Zoe’s hand and then said to him, “I am. Definitely. I don’t want to make cupcakes at Buttered Up, and I don’t want to work as an aide at the school, and I don’t want to do farmwork, and I don’t want to learn data entry for any of the offices in town… and that’s pretty much all there is.”

She was right. Small-town Iowa had limited job opportunities. It was just a fact. In fact, there were fewer jobs now than there had been ten years ago. Online shopping, faster shipping, and bigger stores in the next city over with more selection and cheaper prices made it almost impossible for small shops to stay open in little towns. The jobs in Appleby, like many towns in the Midwest, were teaching, healthcare, or working on the family farm. And even family farms were struggling. If Jane wanted to drive to the next city, there would be more jobs, but that would take job training, if not a degree, as well as time on the road and the expense of gas and more car maintenance along with the time away from her family.

Small Midwestern towns were dying. Young people went away to college and then never came back because there were no jobs. The cities in Iowa were growing, but the rural areas were losing population every year. It was one of the huge reasons keeping Hot Cakes open in Appleby was important to Aiden.

“You make cupcakes every damned day,” Zoe said grumpily. She let go of her friend’s hand as Jane reached for her lemonade.

Jane laughed. “Yeah, okay. But not quite the same way you do, Z.”

The Hot Cakes brand snack cakes offered cream-filled cupcakes—Cupettes—in chocolate, vanilla, and red velvet. They were mini sized—about two bites each—and came in packs of four. They were nothing like what Buttered Up did.

“But you could do cupcakes with me and Josie. If you wanted to.”

Zoe almost seemed a little hurt Jane didn’t want to work for her.

“I don’t even run the cupcake line,” Jane said. “You know that. And even if I did, the machines do all the work. I can’t stand in your cute little yellow bakery in your cute frilly little yellow aprons and make cupcakes into cats and baseballs and…”

“Poop emojis,” Henry said helpfully.

Jane grinned at him. “And poop emojis.”

“You’re very talented and smart and awesome,” Zoe insisted. “Josie and I could teach you. And you look great in yellow.”

Jane shifted in her chair. “Z, I don’t want to be creative like that. I like my job. It’s… a job, and that’s all I want it to be. I don’t need to be creative or fulfilled by my work. I have plenty of problem solving and fulfillment outside of work. I just want to go do my job, not hate it, know what I’m doing every day, and collect a paycheck. I want that to be one area of my life that is steady and predictable and… boring.” She frowned. “I just want it to still be steady with these new people.”

Aiden didn’t know Jane well enough to know everything about her personal life to know what all she was talking about, but he knew she had at least one younger sibling and that her father was sick with one of those horrible, progressive neurological diseases—he couldn’t remember which one at the moment, and he made a note to ask Zoe about it.

Her job would still be stable though. It would be an even better job than it had been before. He’d be sure of it.

And that was the moment it really hit Aiden—he was going to be Jane’s boss.

She was going to be working for him.

Well, that was… awkward.

Now when she bitched to her friends about work and her boss—because everyone bitched about work and their boss—it would be his company and him.

Hot Cakes had nearly three hundred employees. He’d briefly thought about the fact he would personally know many of those employees. That was one of the driving factors for him wanting to buy the damned company in the first place. To save those jobs.

But sitting across Maggie’s dining room table and eating fettuccine with one of them while she worried about her job to her best friends was not something he’d thought through.

If she got pissed off at something at the factory, would she bring it up over dinner with Maggie and Zoe? Maybe. What about the other people at the factory? If they got ticked off, he’d probably hear about it at the post office and the diner and the corner of Depot and Main and probably in the bakery. Of course, that was assuming Zoe didn’t ban him from Buttered Up for the rest of his life.

That was actually kind of how the town worked now. Among those who had deep roots in Appleby, the town was strictly divided, between those loyal to the Lancasters and those loyal to the McCafferys. The Lancasters had a larger number of employees and also a bigger network of people who wanted to be nice to them because of their wealth. Like the bank, the medical clinic they donated to, the various community groups they supported, the mayor whose campaign they’d contributed to.

But the McCafferys had what they called true friends because their allegiances weren’t dependent on employment or donations. There were people who truly thought what Didi Lancaster had done to Letty had been a terrible betrayal and who distrusted the Lancasters’ money and influence. It was also a fact that Didi’s husband Dean and their son, Eric, didn’t have a lot of actual friends. At least not the “regular people” of Appleby. Dean had always given off very elitist airs, and Eric had been an asshole as long as Aiden had known him. Aiden’s dad had never liked Eric and had stories from high school of Eric thinking he was better than everyone else and getting away with a lot because of his daddy’s penchant for getting out his checkbook whenever Eric got into trouble.

There was also a well-known policy at Hot Cakes that no employee there could do business with Buttered Up. It was ridiculous, of course, but no one had ever had the spine to challenge it. That meant all three hundred employees, plus their families, got their birthday and wedding cakes, muffins, cookies and so on from the bakery in the next town. Never from Letty, Maggie, and Zoe. It was why Jane’s sneaking up to the back door of the bakery was a big deal. It was part of the Code of Conduct and was a fireable offense.

It would, of course, be the first thing Aiden changed at the company, but for now, it was one of the biggest things that kept the bitterness between the families alive and well. Just like the fact that none of the McCafferys’ friends or family members bought or ate Hot Cakes products. The convenience store on this side of town didn’t even carry the snack cakes.

It was all ridiculous. The companies were not actual competitors. A prepackaged snack cake someone stuck in their lunch box or grabbed during a road trip was hardly the same thing as a made-from-scratch and custom-decorated cake for a special occasion. There was room in people’s lives for both.

Just not in Appleby.

“You do like your job there though?” Aiden asked.

He had to be careful pressing for information. He couldn’t act too interested. But Jane was a friend. A friend of a friend, at least. And they were on the subject, so surely he could get away with a few questions without it seeming suspect.

“I do,” she said. “Mostly.”

“Except when they’re making you do mandatory overtime,” Josie said.

“Well, right,” Jane said.

“And not when they’re offering people early retirement and then not replacing them,” Zoe said.

“Right.” Jane sighed.

“And not when they’re taking away the childcare center,” Josie said.

Jane held up her hands and gave Aiden a weak smile. “I said mostly, right?”

He was frowning and worked on not acting completely pissed off about the things Josie and Zoe had revealed. “All that has happened?”

“It has.” She shrugged. “Cutbacks.”

“Why all the cutbacks?” he asked. “They netted five million last year. That’s down a little over the past three years but it’s still profitable.”

They all stared at him.

Right. Why would he know that? Shit. “I was curious when they went up for sale,” he explained. Which was true. He’d wondered if they’d been losing money or if someone had been embezzling or just what the hell was going on.

Jane leaned in. “Eric was hanging on, doing the bare minimum, until his dad died. Then he just let it go. Didn’t invest, did as much cutting as he could. It’s clear he’s completely over it. Everyone was sure he was just going to close it up.”

Aiden knew all about Eric’s attitude. But he hadn’t known about the cuts and early retirements. Because he hadn’t asked.

He realized he’d come in here thinking he’d be the big hero, but just keeping the factory open was not the whole story. There was a lot more that needed to be done to make Hot Cakes a great place to work.

He was going to do it. He had to. Not just because this was his hometown and people he knew, but because how could he not? How did someone pocket five million dollars while their employees, the people actually doing the work, worked mandatory overtime and lost their childcare?

“I know you’re worried,” Zoe said to Jane. “But just know my offer stands.”

“And I love you for it, and if these new people are horrible, I might be begging on your doorstep,” Jane said with a smile. “But I’m hopeful it will be okay.”

“You can’t employ them all,” Aiden said. Without really thinking. But even as Zoe frowned at him, he didn’t regret it. He lifted his eyebrows. “You can’t absorb the entire Hot Cakes workforce, so that’s not really a solution to this problem, is it?”

“So?” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“That’s a lot of people out of work if this new buyer hadn’t come along.”

“Not really my problem,” she said. “They all chose to work there. People think a big company is going to take care of them, but sometimes they learn the hard way.” She glanced at Jane. “Sorry, babe. But you know I’m right. Big companies are less intimate. They care less about individual people. There’s less loyalty. It’s about the bottom line.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Aiden protested.

“I suppose it doesn’t,” she allowed. “If rich people weren’t assholes who only think of themselves.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Referring to anyone in particular?”

“You and Cam are pretty generous,” she said. “But tell me, Aiden, do you like being rich?”

She was such a brat. “I do. Because then I can give it away.”

“Sure. But you still make more than fifty grand a year, right? And you don’t worry about things like your farmland flooding or your kid getting a basketball scholarship because that’s the only way you can afford college, or you being off work because of a horrible case of pneumonia and using up your sick days.” She leaned in, pinning him with a serious look. “Your money doesn’t just give you money, Aiden. It gives you privilege. Privilege to not worry. To not be scared. To not lie awake at night and wonder what you’re going to do. To not be at someone else’s mercy. You work your ass off and you’re rewarded for it. You don’t have to sit around and wait for someone else to notice you’re working your ass off and feel generous toward you.”

Her eyes were glittering and her cheeks were pink. She looked a lot like she had after he’d kissed the hell out of her against the fridge. Or when she’d been pissed at him for telling her they should get married.

But this was even hotter in a way. Because now she was riled up on someone else’s behalf.

“You’re right.”

Her eyes flickered with surprise at his response.

But she was right. “You’re absolutely right.” He looked at Jane. “The first thing you need to do when new people take over is make an appointment to talk to the CEO. You’ve been there a long time. You know all the people who work there. You know the place inside and out. Tell him you have some ideas and demands. Tell him you can be a resource. And tell him there needs to be some changes.”

Jane’s eyes had gotten progressively wider as he spoke. Then she laughed. “Sure. Okay, Aiden, I’ll do that.”

“Trust me. Someone needs to speak up for the employees.” He frowned.

“I told her she should be the union leader,” Josie said.

Jane gave Josie an eye roll. “Yeah. I don’t want that at all.”

“Why not?” Aiden asked.

“I take care of and worry about a lot of people outside of work,” she said. “I don’t want to be in charge of worrying or taking care of people at work too.”

“You already do,” Josie pointed out with an affectionate smile.

Jane sighed. “I just want to go to work, get paid, and go home.”

“But you can’t, because you’re strong and smart and loving,” Zoe said. “You care about the work conditions and how people are treated and if they’re happy. You can’t help it. You might as well be in a position to do something about it.”

Aiden nodded. “You really need to at least get your current union leader to meet with the new management.”

With him. Aiden realized it was strange he was giving her this advice. Eventually, she would find out it was him he was encouraging her to meet with. But he really did want to hear this. He wouldn’t be waltzing into a company that was perfect and running smoothly, obviously. But if he knew the problems, he could fix them. Hopefully.

“We don’t have a union leader right now,” Jane said.

“Then you need to do it,” Aiden told her. Jane was perfect for it. She was smart and dedicated and no-nonsense. She knew the factory inside and out. If Aiden wanted to know what was really going on, Jane was exactly who he should be talking to. “As a guy in management, I can tell you people like you are invaluable to us.”

“I’m not some geeky computer programmer who knows all about dragons and trolls.” She gave Henry a wink. “I’m just a girl who knows how to push buttons and pull levers.”

Aiden dropped it. For now. His pushing was going to seem suspicious. But he needed to get into the factory, see how it worked, figure some things out, dive into the employee benefits. And more. There was a lot. He was going to need his partners.

They could look at benefits, even talk to employees. Cam would review the contracts, of course. Grant could help look at new benefit plans and do some cost analysis. The Fluke team could definitely make this happen.

“Well, Letty is probably frowning down from heaven, convinced Didi waited to sell until Letty was dead,” Steve said with a little chuckle. Clearly, he was trying to lighten things up and divert the conversation from all of Jane’s worries.

Maggie shook her head. “Didi probably did.”

“Oh, come on,” Steve said.

“You come on,” Maggie told him. “You always said there were two sides to the story, but she named it Hot Cakes. You know that made Letty almost crazier than anything.”

Aiden looked from Steve to Maggie and then back. “What do you mean? What about the name made Letty crazy?”

He’d heard some of the stories about Charlotte “Letty” McCaffery and Dorothy “Didi” Lancaster, best friends growing up, who started the bakery together—and then Didi’s betrayal—but it was very possible there were family stories he didn’t know. Now, more than ever, he was curious about the feud.

“Once it was doing well and she was getting ready to incorporate and make it an official business, Didi went to Mom and asked if she’d be her partner,” Steve said. Letty was his mother, but he’d had no interest in the bakery as a full-time job. Fortunately, his young wife had jumped at the chance to work with Letty and had eventually taken it over.

“Wait, Didi asked Letty to be her partner in Hot Cakes?” Aiden asked. He’d definitely never heard that part of the story.

Steve nodded. “Yep. They hadn’t spoken in months, but Didi credited her success to Mom’s recipe and told her, ‘They’re selling like hotcakes, Letty. Come on, let’s do this together.’” He shook his head. “Mom told her she could shove her hot cakes straight up her ass. So Didi went on and filed her official paperwork, including trademarking the original recipe, and the name Hot Cakes. When they first painted that on the side of their factory, I thought Mom was going to have a stroke.”

Aiden’s eyes were wide, he knew. Everyone around the table was listening raptly. “I have never heard this part of the story,” Aiden said.

He glanced at Zoe. She shook her head. Josie and Jane looked just as surprised.

“What I’ve heard is that the most popular cake among the men who would stop in before their work shifts was the butter cake,” Aiden said. “One day, one of the men asked Didi and Letty if they could wrap up several pieces and bring them out to the factory—when the farm implement factory was still here.”

Steve nodded. “He said if they could bring them out there, right to the men, they could sell a lot more. Mom, of course, said no. That would mean one of them needing to leave the bakery, and she had no way of knowing how much more to make and a dozen other excuses.”

“So Didi did it on her own. Just to see what would happen,” Aiden said. “She made extra cakes the night before at home, wrapped up individual pieces, and took them out there.”

“And sold out,” Steve said.

“But she couldn’t tell Letty because Letty would have been upset with her,” Aiden went on with the story he knew. “And she wanted to be sure it wasn’t just a one-time stroke of luck. She did it again. But word had spread and she ran out. Men promised to buy them if she’d bring extra the next day. She did. She made a couple of other kinds of cake too. Everything sold out. Then people would stop her and ask if she could come by their place of work to sell them some. It was the convenience of it that they liked. Pretty soon, she was doing it every morning before work. It went on for over a month before she told Letty about it. She was sure Letty would be excited because it was new business—people who didn’t have time to stop by or a way to get to the bakery before work but who wanted the cakes for lunch or snacks.”

“And Letty was absolutely not excited. She was furious. They had a huge fight about Didi going behind her back and using her recipes,” Steve said. “But Didi knew it was a great business plan.”

“So she kept doing it. With Letty’s butter cake recipe,” Maggie said.

Steve nodded. “She used other recipes for the other cakes, but that was the most popular one and the one people asked for when she tried to leave it off her menu. She adapted it a bit, but everyone—including Letty—knew it was essentially Letty’s recipe and the whole reason things took off for Didi.”

Aiden sat back in his chair. “But she offered Letty a chance to go into business with her and Letty turned her down.”

“She couldn’t have said yes to that,” Zoe said from across the table. “Didi took her recipe and then kept selling the cakes even after she knew Letty was upset. Didi chose making money over their friendship.”

“Or was she just embarrassed Didi’s idea was better than her own?” Aiden asked.

“Better?” Zoe asked with a frown. “We make cakes that mean something. We make birthdays special. We’re a part of celebrations like weddings and graduations and retirements. People come to us for special occasions. Not just a wrapped-up snack cake people don’t think twice about when they wolf it down at lunch.”

Aiden took a deep breath. She was right. He wasn’t wrong. Didi hadn’t been wrong. But Letty hadn’t been wrong either.

“But Letty was too proud to expand her business and save her friendship,” Aiden said, his eyes on Zoe.

Zoe met his gaze. “Or was she brave enough to realize maybe that friendship wasn’t what she thought it was and to let it go in order to keep doing what she believed in?”

Okay, that was another way of looking at it.

He turned to Steve. “Was that why Letty never changed anything at the bakery? Because she was proving what she’d been doing from day one was right just as it was?”

“You’ve got it,” Steve said with a nod. “She wouldn’t even want to add a new pie after that because people might not like it. And that would be like admitting Didi had been right in thinking the bakery wasn’t already everything it could be.”

“Wow.” Aiden shook his head. Then looked at Zoe again. Surely, she could see that that level of stubbornness was too much.

Zoe just looked back at him, leaning on her forearms on the tabletop.

“Grandma told me if someone makes fun of you, you have to act like you love whatever they’re making fun of.”

Everyone looked at Henry as he scooped the last of his noodles into his mouth.

He had been, for the most part, ignoring everything they were talking about. Or at least, he’d seemed to be. Henry’s future plans had nothing to do with the bakery. He fully intended to come work for Cam and Aiden and one day take over their company. Probably by the time he was twenty-five, if they were all being honest.

“When did she tell you that?” Aiden asked.

“A kid at school was making fun of this part of my hair that always sticks up.” Henry flicked at the cowlick on the back of his head. “I told her it was making me mad and asked her to cut it off. She said no way. The best way to get back at that kid was to get some gel and make that part of my hair really stick up and then tell everyone how much I loved it. She said people won’t make fun of things if they think it won’t bug you.”

Steve and Maggie both smiled at Henry. “That hair shouldn’t bug you,” Maggie said. “It’s just hair.”

Henry nodded. “Yeah, and when I made it stick up on purpose, that’s kind of what everyone figured out.”

Aiden thought about that. It was all very interesting. Didi had proposed change, and that change had worked out. She’d made a point of that with Letty, even naming her company Hot Cakes because her cakes were selling like crazy, and in response, Letty had dug in, deep, on exactly what she’d been doing, absolutely not changing a single thing.

They started clearing the dishes from the table and conversation diverted to lighter topics, probably by Josie and Maggie, until eventually, Aiden found himself in the dining room with Zoe alone, picking up an empty breadbasket and a handful of forks.

“I assume you still want to get in my pants?” she asked.

Maybe being in the dining room alone with her wasn’t an accident.

“With everything in me,” he said sincerely, looking at her across the table.

“Then I would suggest you quit thinking my grandmother was crazy and stop defending Didi Lancaster and Hot Cakes to me,” she said.

Aiden sighed. “Zoe, come on. You know the factory needs to stay open. You have to be able to sympathize with all those people. This town. The town would be affected if that factory closed.”

“They’re our competition, Aiden.”

“They’re not really. And you know that.”

“The Butter Sticks should have been ours.”

He sighed. “That may be true,” he admitted. “But those don’t actually compete with anything you sell now.”

“You don’t think people sometimes grab Peanut Butter Pinwheels or Fudgie Fritters rather than coming in for peanut butter cupcakes or fudge brownies from me because they’re easier and already packaged and cheaper?”

He thought carefully about how to answer. Finally, he just went with honest. “Okay, yeah, they probably do.”

“Of course they do,” she said with an eye roll.

“But if Hot Cakes was in another town or even state, it would be the same thing. You could say the same thing of Hostess or Little Debbie. You don’t consider them competition, do you?”

“I do,” she told him stubbornly. “But, of course, Hot Cakes is different because all that could have been ours.”

He didn’t believe that, actually. Even if they’d kept the original butter cake recipe, they never would have packaged them individually and sold them in gas stations. He studied her for a moment. “So why don’t you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Prepackage some stuff and make it cheaper.”

“I don’t have the machines or capacity to do something like that.”

“You could figure it out. Just wrap or box things individually.”

“Extra packaging costs more money. I have to cover my costs.”

“Then make the stuff smaller. The Fudgie Fritters are way smaller than your brownies. For a reason,” he said.

“The other reason is they’re mass produced and they can negotiate for bulk ingredients,” she said. “There’s a limit to what I can do.”

“But you could do something. If your quality is better—which it is,” he said quickly, holding up a hand,“then people will pay more. Prepackage some stuff, and mark it down a little, and talk to the convenience store about some shelf space.”

“How does marking it down help me make more money?”

“At a lower price you could sell greater quantities.” She knew this, but he was willing to talk it out with her. “Or if you don’t want to do that, add some new products.”

“I did. We’re doing cake pops now.”

“With the leftover cake and frosting you already make. And only because Josie pushed. And you kind of hate them,” he said.

She didn’t deny it.

“Maybe you could offer something like cake-decorating classes instead.”

“And teach people to make everything for themselves instead of paying us to do it?”

“You have an excuse to avoid every single idea.” She was incredibly obstinate. But she made his heart pound. She didn’t think he was always right or perfect or some kind of savior. And that was probably good for him.

“They’re all risks,” Zoe said.

“You mean they’re all changes.”

She frowned.

Aiden smiled. God, she was stubborn. And gorgeous. And a pain in the ass. And he’d never wanted a woman more.

“So about me getting into your pants…”

“Not tonight,” she told him with a look that said that should have been obvious.

“And why’s that?”

“You’ve been arguing with me all night. And judging me. I’m not taking my clothes off for you after that.”

But that sure as hell sounded like there was a chance that was going to happen in the future. If he toed her line. He grinned internally. He’d do whatever he had to. He could work on softening her feelings toward Hot Cakes more slowly.

“For future notice, if I want to get you naked, I need to always go along with whatever you say, do whatever you want, and generally agree that you’re always right.”

She nodded. “Yes. Definitely. Absolutely.” She tilted her head and looked him up and down. “And wearing a suit doesn’t hurt.”

Then she turned on her heel and headed into the kitchen.

He looked down at his t-shirt and jeans. And chuckled.

But if she thought she’d just stumped him there, she was very wrong.

He had plenty of suits. And as she’d pointed out, plenty of money to get more.

Was that also privileged of him? Yes, yes it was. Because getting Zoe McCaffery naked was absolutely going to be a privilege.