by Julie Kriss
Filthy Rich
Julie Kriss
Copyright © 2019 by Julie Kriss
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Coming Next
Also by Julie Kriss
One
Samantha
* * *
There are three kinds of bosses: the kind you dislike, the kind you hate, and the kind you loathe.
As an executive assistant to CEOs, that was my philosophy—honed by working for the most demanding bosses in New York City. Years of working for rich, entitled men had never changed my mind.
But with this job, for the first time I wondered.
It was six thirty in the morning. I was already up and dressed for the office, standing in my kitchen eating a bowl of oatmeal with berries on it and sipping a coffee. I’d gotten out of bed half an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off. My little Hell’s Kitchen apartment was dim and quiet, only the faint traffic sounds of 9th Avenue floating up ten floors to my window. My makeup was done and my hair was up. I reached for my cell phone to look up my to-do list for today at the office.
And as my thumb hovered over my phone screen, I realized that for the first time in nine years, I was thinking about my work day without a sick feeling of anger or dread. In fact, I was almost… looking forward to it.
That couldn’t be possible, could it?
I swiped my phone on and opened my schedule app, the one I shared with Aidan Winters, the CEO of Tower Venture Capital. As Aidan’s executive assistant, I had access to his schedule and he had access to mine. At a glance, I could see that Aidan’s first meeting was at ten o’clock. It was with Rob and Jared Egerton, the brothers who headed up Ghosted, one of New York’s hot startups. I had originally booked the meeting to end at eleven, but the app showed me that Aidan himself had extended that to twelve.
I knew what that meant: good news for the Egerton brothers.
Basically, the job of a venture capital firm is to give other businesses money—lots and lots of money—for a return on investment. Tower VC had millions of dollars—tens of millions, maybe. Aidan’s job, which he was a genius at, was to take those millions and turn them into millions more.
The Egerton brothers must be looking for venture capital for Ghosted, an app that allowed you to track exactly who has ghosted you on dating sites. It was a silly product that had gotten splashes of media attention when a couple of celebrities admitted to using it. They were about to go public in a few months. They’d gotten a meeting with Aidan, which was a coup in itself. But if Aidan thought the meeting was going to go long, it meant he’d pretty much made up his mind already.
Which meant there was going to be a deal.
After three months working for Aidan, I knew the pattern. Short meetings were a no; medium meetings meant he was undecided. Only twice had I seen Aidan extend one of the meetings in his schedule, and both times had resulted in a deal.
Standing in my kitchen, I smiled to myself. This was what it meant to work for Aidan Winters: I knew the outcome of a potential high-level multimillion-dollar deal hours before the meeting even happened. And he hadn’t even had to tell me what he was thinking.
If you think this is the story of a girl who hates her boss, think again.
Two
Samantha
* * *
Bad bosses were pretty much a specialty of mine.
It ran in the family. My sister, Emma, older and bossier than me, ran Executive Ranks, a company that specialized in providing executive assistants to the most high-level clients. Emma recruited executive assistants, trained them, tested them, and ran extensive background checks. Most of the potentials she took on never made the final cut. The few who went the distance were personally referred by Executive Ranks and placed in highly paid, highly confidential positions.
I had been her first, and best, recruit. For nine years, I’d worked for every kind of bad boss there was: raging assholes, doddering old fogies, entitled jerks who’d inherited multimillion-dollar businesses from Daddy. I’d worked for alcoholics and gropers and men who couldn’t recall their own children’s names. I’d been called sweetheart and little girl and every foul name in the book. I’d picked up dry cleaning in a snowstorm and driven to New Jersey to deliver a Christmas gift to a mistress while my boss was at home with his wife and kids. Working for some of New York’s richest, most powerful men was high-stress work and it wasn’t fun, but it paid well.
And I was good at it. The best, in fact. At twenty-nine I was the most sought-after executive assistant at Executive Ranks, with the highest pay grade. After the last CEO I worked for retired, I was available only to the highest, most vetted bidder.
That turned out to be Aidan Winters. He was thirty-four, brilliant, mysterious, and apparently filthy rich.
He was also gorgeous and single. But that was none of my business.
I stepped out of the hired car in front of the Tower VC offices and thanked the driver. That was one of the perks of working for Aidan: he had a car and driver take me to work and home every day. He’d had to add it to his offer to Executive Ranks in order to sweeten the deal and hire me. It worked.
The Tower VC offices weren’t on Madison Avenue or Wall Street; they were in Tribeca, a smaller, funkier area of New York. Tower only had twenty employees, so there was no need for a grand suite of offices or a building with a name on the side. Just the top floor of a renovated, century-old building with open, high-ceilinged lofts. The building was modest and the interior design was understated, but none of it was cheap. Tribeca real estate was expensive, just like any real estate in New York City.
I shouldered my purse and huddled in to my knee-length trench coat. It was early May, and the weather could go in any direction, from stifling warm to freezing cold. Today was sunny, but the wind was cool, reminding everyone that spring wasn’t fully happening yet.
Inside the front doors, I greeted the security guard, swiped my pass, and got in the elevator, a beautiful retro cage-like contraption that had old-fashioned doors. When they’d renovated this building, they’d redone the elevator so the workings were safe and modern but the appearance was still vintage 1950s.
When the doors opened on the seventh floor, I was greeted with the smell of coffee. It was eight o’clock, thirty minutes before Aidan was due to arrive. A good executive assistant always gets to work before her boss does, so that he never walks in to a delay or a problem.<
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I walked to my office—Aidan and I had two of the only enclosed offices in the huge space—and put down my purse and my coat. I walked back out to the coffee station to get myself a cup. There was no crappy gasoline-grade coffee at Tower—only the best, and it was unlimited for employees. It was generous, but Aidan had once told me that since he’d put in the coffee station, productivity had gone up. “People do more work,” he said, “when they aren’t doing constant Starbucks runs. Don’t tell anyone I said that.”
Next to the coffee station, I could see three employees huddled around a laptop.
“Wow,” said Lianne, one of our accountants. “So that’s what he was doing last night.”
“Solo or with a plus-one?” Jason, one of our HR people, leaned in, trying not to tip his coffee cup.
“Definitely solo.” Tara, the office manager, clicked on a photo, and she and Lianne sighed. “God, he’s hot as ever.” She glanced up at me. “Hey, Samantha. Have you seen where our fearless leader was last night?”
I came closer and looked at the screen. It was a New York gossip site. The photo was of Aidan Winters, wearing a black suit and black shirt. He was ascending the steps of a swanky hotel, his head tilted slightly toward the camera as if he’d just noticed the photographer. His dark hair was combed back, his jaw clean-shaven. His hand was resting lightly on one lapel, as if he were in the process of smoothing it, and an expensive wristwatch gleamed from his cuff. His high cheekbones and perfect mouth were hard and his dark eyes were a little cold, as if glimpsing the photographer had annoyed him.
The headline read: Who will land the Man in Black? Winters arrives alone at yet another event. No one has caught New York’s richest—and hottest—bachelor yet!
The Man in Black. One of the gossip sites had started using that, and the name had caught on. It wasn’t a bad nickname, because Aidan really did wear black—he didn’t wear any other color. Even when he wore a suit, his shirt and his tie were always black. It made him look calm and a little bit sinister, like he didn’t care what anyone thought about what he wore. It unsettled people. I sometimes wondered if that was the effect he was going for.
The other thing the gossip sites loved about him was his looks. There was no denying that Aidan Winters, with his dark hair, perfect jaw, dark eyes, and perfect body beneath the black suit, was a gorgeous man. He was also single, and unlike most other rich bachelors, he wasn’t seen with a lineup of different women. Whenever he attended public events, like this one, he attended alone.
I sighed and sipped my coffee, my gaze lingering on the photo of Aidan on the hotel steps. “They really don’t want to leave him alone, do they?”
“Why would they?” Lianne said. “Single, gorgeous, rich, brilliant. He has it all.”
“Don’t forget mysterious,” Tara said.
“Definitely. I mean, do you think he can’t get a date?” Lianne scrolled down. “That’s insane. Even if he wasn’t into women, he’d still have any date he wanted. Why does he go to every event on his own?”
There was a pause as the three of them looked at me.
“What?” I said. “I know as much as you do.”
“You must know something,” Lianne said. “You know all the inside secrets.”
“Is there a secret girlfriend?” Jason turned toward me, leaning in. “You can tell us.”
“No, no,” Tara said. “He had his heart broken years ago, and he can never love again.” She put her hand on her heart. “He just needs the love of a good woman to heal him.”
“Forget it,” Lianne said. “He’s Christian Grey. The secret room with the whips and chains and whatnot. Not that I read that book, mind you.”
They laughed, but my gaze moved back to the photo. There was something about the perfection of him, the carelessness of the angle, that drew me in. His hand on his lapel—it was a capable, masculine hand, flawlessly formed. I’d seen Aidan’s hands every day, but I stared at the hand in that photograph. Then I looked at his icy eyes. I wasn’t lying to the others—I had no idea who Aidan dated, if anyone, or when.
He must get dozens of potential offers—so he must make the decision to attend events alone. Why?
None of your business, Samantha.
I shook myself out of my trance and held up my hand. “Oh, my God. Enough, you guys. The event he was at last night wasn’t in his schedule. He must have decided to go on impulse.” I pointed at the computer screen. “Now, get rid of that before he gets here. And don’t let him hear you talk like that. He doesn’t care about gossip, but hearing his employees repeat it annoys him.”
They groaned good-naturedly, but Lianne closed the webpage and they went back to work. Aidan wasn’t a boss who had tantrums or screaming matches. No, he got annoyed. That was all. And that was plenty for anyone with two brain cells to rub together. If you wanted to keep your job, with the perks and the good coffee, you didn’t annoy Aidan.
I only had ten minutes now before Aidan was due in. I unlocked his office. It was big, high ceilinged, the look a little bit industrial like the rest of the office. There were no windows to the main room, but there was a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street. From here, Aidan could see the bustle of Tribeca as he worked in privacy.
I powered on his MacBook, typing in his password. I checked the surface of his glass-topped desk to make sure nothing was left there that he didn’t want to see. I did a quick sweep of the room to make sure that housekeeping had emptied the garbage and wiped down the glass and the polished wood. Aidan was a man who brought his own coffee, so I was spared that task.
When his office was ready, I locked it again and went back to my own. My office was much smaller than Aidan’s, and it had windows to the main room—probably so that my boss could keep tabs on me if he wanted to. I also had a window to the street, though it was smaller. It was fine with me. I’d worked in ugly cubicles and cubes that froze with air conditioning. For one memorable assignment, I’d actually shared office space with my boss—never again. At Tower I had sunlight, a nice desk, and just enough privacy. I liked it.
I logged in to Aidan’s email account and began to sort the emails that had come to him, setting aside the high-priority ones, filing the low-priority ones separately, and deleting the trash.
The highest-priority items were always from Aidan’s partners at Tower VC. This morning there was a message from Noah Pearson, the partner in L.A. It was short, as a lot of the partners’ emails were. We need to meet in Chicago next week, it said. Tuesday at the Chicago office. Eight a.m.
I filed that one so that Aidan would see it first. While Aidan worked here in New York, one of the Tower partners worked in Chicago, there was one in L.A., and a fourth partner worked in Dallas. The company lore was that the partners had all been roommates when they were down-and-out teenagers in Chicago. Now, all these years later, all of them were rich and they were still business partners and still friends. While Tower had spread to several offices, the Chicago office was still home.
In the three months I’d worked for Aidan, the partners hadn’t had a meeting like this. I wondered why one was being called now.
I felt a change in the atmosphere, something that made my spine straighten. Maybe it was a scent or a breath of air. I looked up to see Aidan standing in my open doorway.
He was wearing his customary black suit, with black shirt and tie. It fit his long, muscled body, just as all of his suits did. He was leaning casually against the doorframe of my office, a coffee in one hand. He was freshly showered and freshly shaved, and his dark eyes with their dark lashes were watching me with seriousness and a tinge of humor.
“Good morning, Samantha,” he said.
I smiled at him over the top of my laptop. It wasn’t hard at all to smile at the sight of him. “Good morning, Aidan.”
“Email is engrossing?” he asked, sipping his coffee.
“Your email always is.”
“I’ll take your word for it, since I haven’t read it.”
Unlike most of the CEOs I’d worked for, Aidan didn’t get work emails on his phone. He had a private number given to only a few people, and if one of those people needed to reach him urgently after hours, they could text him. Otherwise, he’d read his work email when he got around to it.
It was part of his mystery. Every CEO I’d worked for had been glued to his texts and emails night and day. Aidan wasn’t. What did he do in his off-hours? My only experience was with workaholics, so I had no idea.
Well, I knew what he’d done in his off-hours last night. He’d gone to a gala. Alone.
“Is there a reason Noah Pearson is calling for a partner meeting by email, instead of texting you?” I asked. All of the partners must know that an email would get to Aidan much more slowly than a text to his private line.
Aidan shrugged. “Probably because he knows you’ll see an email before I do, which means that whatever he wants will actually get done.”
“But he’s never met me,” I said. I hadn’t met any of the partners yet, since they weren’t here in New York.
“He doesn’t have to meet you,” Aidan said. “He knows that I turn up everywhere I’m supposed to, on time and fully dressed. That means you must be competent. If he texted the request to me, I’d never show up.”
I shook my head. “Thank you for the compliment, but I doubt that.” Aidan was one of the smartest men I’d ever met. “I’ve never seen you forget anything.”
