Filthy Rich: The Complete Series

Chapter 1

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.