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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.
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.
