Filthy Rich (Filthy Rich 1)

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.