Falling for the Billionaire's Daughter - Lori Ryan

Chapter 1

It wasn’t a particularly threatening sentence, but it still set Kaeden O’Shea on edge.

“Stick around for a minute, Kaeden.”

Kaeden O’Shea sank back into his chair at his boss’s words. He liked and respected Jack Sutton but at the moment, he didn’t want to talk to his boss.

His gut told him Jack was about to remind him his attendance at the upcoming Sutton retreat was mandatory. Two weeks in Colorado with his team, the executive team, and their families probably sounded like fun to a lot of people.

An all-expenses paid trip. Fun and free time in the mountains. Two weeks of vacation he didn’t have to use vacation time for. What’s not to love?

For him, the list was long. To start, he didn’t really do well sitting around with nothing to do. Relaxation just wasn’t his thing. He’d much rather keep working on the analysis he’d started for an upcoming acquisition Sutton was considering.

For another, he had zero interest in bonding with people and that’s what this trip was about. He liked his coworkers well enough and respected them all. He was on a team of people who all had backgrounds in tech who specialized in various aspects of engineering, science, and information technology. His team was all former military, including him.

He knew Sutton Capital had sought out veterans largely because of the fact their security head and one of the main shareholders in the company was a former Army Ranger, but also because of the knowledge base they could bring to their work.

Kaeden appreciated the fact they were all veterans who’d seen action and understood each other on a level civilians often didn’t, but he still preferred to cut that relationship off at the business end of things.

He didn’t want or need to be friends with them. Singing campfire songs and whatnot while they all talked about how much they were bonding and how much better they’d work together when they came home from the trip? Yeah, no thanks.

He didn’t need to meet his boss’s family or get to know the kids of his coworkers. Plenty of the people he worked with were married with kids and dogs and all the things you were supposed to want in life. That was great for them, but he saw no reason to be a part of that area of their lives.

So he’d pretty much planned on begging off at the last minute. He still wasn’t sure if he was going to say he’d had a family emergency or maybe he’d pretend to be sick then get well enough to come to the office and work while they all played in the woods. Either way, he was getting out of the trip. So today he just had to convince Jack he wanted to go so he’d buy it when Kaeden had to back out at the last minute.

The rest of the group filed out of the room, most of them talking about where to get lunch, while he closed down his computer and waited for Jack to start the lecture.

Jack leaned on the conference table next to Kaeden. “I want to bring a new team on board over the next quarter. Another tech team a lot like this one but with a heavier focus on AI. I know you’re interested in artificial intelligence…”

Kaeden sat up. He was more than interested in it. He was fascinated with recent developments in machine learning and AI in the medical field. People thought AI was all about computers and androids taking over jobs that people could do, but there was so much more to it than that. It could revolutionize brain treatment by stimulating brain cell regrowth or be used to create intelligent computers that could cut years off research into new drugs and cures for diseases.

Two of the members of his team, Jax Cutter and Dave Alexander, took on most of the projects that dealt with tech in medical fields, but Kaeden had shown Jack a few companies he thought had potential to make huge strides in medicine with the AI they were developing. If Jack was planning to expand their work in that area, he sure as hell wanted to be in on it. And leading a team focused on that was his dream job.

But Jack wasn’t finished and the conversation wasn’t headed the way Kaeden wanted it to go.

“I need to see more from you before I can tap you for this. I need to know you can lead a team. You’ve shown me