The Boyfriend Project

by Farrah Rochon

  The reins of the presentation were passed on from team member to team member. None of them had been tripped up by the slight changes she’d made, which once again proved that she and John had put together one of the best teams ever.

  She could bring them all with her if she took the Outreach Department head position.

  Samiah wasn’t even sure where she stood yet regarding Justin and Barrington’s offer, but that hadn’t stopped her from arranging and rearranging the structure of the department a thousand times in her head. She wanted to bring in people from all aspects of the company, not just Human Resources or the Public Relations departments. Every division had a stake in this. This current project was the perfect example of the magical outcomes in store when creative minds from all areas of the company came together for a common goal.

  She could be directing all that magic. All she had to do was say yes.

  Samiah tucked those thoughts back into her mental lockbox and returned her attention to the presentation. This wasn’t the time or place to let her mind wander.

  It was Keighleigh’s turn to present. She began by pointing out the various flaws in the Leyland Group’s previous applications. After a few minutes, she started to discuss potential patches for unforeseen security risks that might develop in the future. Samiah stood upright, her spine going ramrod straight.

  This bitch.

  Why hadn’t she anticipated this? Of course Keighleigh would pull this kind of bullshit move, despite every single person on their team knowing that she was once again usurping Samiah’s idea. This is what she got for scheduling her conniving, spotlight-stealing coworker’s portion of the presentation to go right before what should have been her big finish.

  “This is ingenuity at its finest,” Barrington said once the other woman was done. “How do you suppose we implement these potential fixes, Keighleigh?”

  Samiah caught the flash of panic behind Keighleigh’s strained smile before her coworker pointed to the back of the room and said, “I’ll leave that to our fearless team leader to explain.”

  Seething, Samiah started for the other end of the conference room before Daniel’s words stopped her.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and do it, Keighleigh?”

  Every head in the conference room turned to him, but his eyes remained on a stunned Keighleigh Miller. The smile on his face belied the tension emanating from him. He was pissed. For her.

  Samiah’s heart melted.

  “Daniel’s right,” Barrington said. “Bring this home for us. I’m sure Samiah doesn’t mind.”

  If there was a dictionary entry for scared shitless, Keighleigh Miller’s face would be in the little square box right next to it. Her wide, panicked gaze flew from Daniel’s to Barrington’s to the smart board, and finally to Samiah’s.

  A small part of her—the tiniest, most infinitesimal part that was still capable of empathizing with a fellow human being, even if said human being was straight-up trash—felt sorry for Keighleigh. But then Samiah mentally gut-punched that tiny part of her and sat it in a corner, facing the wall.

  Keighleigh deserved every second of the excruciating misery she was no doubt feeling right now. She’d manipulated her way into this job, riding coattails and passing off the ideas of her fellow coworkers as her own, with no thought about the consequences of her actions. Well, it was time baby girl faced the music.

  The atmosphere in the room quickly reached nails-down-a-chalkboard levels of discomfort as they all sat there waiting for Keighleigh to continue. In what she could only describe as an attempt to bank a few brownie points to get into heaven, Samiah finally decided to have mercy on her coworker.

  Her phone began vibrating in her dress pocket, but she ignored it as she continued onward, plucking the stylus from Keighleigh’s hand and tapping the smart board’s screen.

  “Thanks for setting that up for me, Keighleigh, but I’ll take it from here.”

  Samiah dismissed her with a brief tilt of her head, then went on to succinctly explain the implementation plan. She answered every single question her superiors lobbed at her, showing them just why Trendsetters was lucky to have her. She was impressive as fuck, and everyone in this room knew it.

  Once the presentation was done, the Leyland Group team members received the accolades they deserved for a job well done. After a significant amount of backslapping and congratulatory fist bumps, everyone began to file out of the conference room. Samiah lingered behind. So did Daniel.

  Once they were alone, she walked up to him and held her hand out. “Brilliant move there, Mr. Collins.”

  He huffed out a laugh as he shook her hand.

  “She had it coming,” he said. “How is she going to stand up there and present your part, knowing that we all know she didn’t have anything to do with devising that implementation plan?”

  “Because she’s gotten away with doing things like that from the moment she started here,” Samiah said. “Keighleigh has ridden that ‘everyone is on the same team’ horse into the ground, and no one has called her on it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll be accused of not being a team player, or of being a show-off.”

  “Yet that’s exactly what she did.” He hooked his thumb toward the smart board. “That was all about showing off. Someone needed to call her out.”

  Samiah shrugged. She couldn’t argue with him. She was just as culpable when it came to allowing Keighleigh to get away with the shenanigans she’d been pulling since she first started at Trendsetters. They’d all allowed it. But not Daniel. He’d spoken up on her behalf.

  Samiah glanced over both shoulders, making sure they were alone and that the windows of the conference room were still opaque. Then she tilted her face up and placed a quick kiss on his lips.

  “Thank you for having my back,” she said. “It’s not easy to find people I can trust around here. It means a lot.”

  The muscles in his jaw flinched and he averted his eyes.

  Samiah frowned. “Is something wrong?”

  He blinked hard then shook his head. “No. Not at all.” His smile returned. “Congratulations on that presentation. You think we’ll get a pizza party out of this?”

  “A pizza party? I won’t settle for anything less than steak and lobster,” Samiah said. “And considering the money the Leyland Group paid for this rush job, I may demand that steak and lobster be served on the deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean.”

  His eyes bugged. “Would they actually do that?”

  Samiah burst out laughing. “Don’t get too excited. They don’t treat us that well here. But you should expect a nice dinner, at the very least. And maybe some premium Trendsetters’ swag.”

  “That works for me.”

  “Oh, shoot!” Samiah snapped her fingers. “I meant to talk to Justin before he left. We need to discuss my security access.”

  “What about it?”

  “A new team was just formed to help Huston-Tillotson University—a small historically black university here in Austin—with networking issues. It’s similar to a project I worked on last year, so they’re restoring some of the security clearances I previously had. It’ll give me access to all the databases I’ll need for research purposes.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “That’s…um…cool. You, uh, want to grab lunch?”

  “Sure.” Samiah regarded him with a slight frown. He seemed…off. “Just give me a few minutes to check email.”

  She returned to her desk to find an email from Barrington waiting in her inbox, thanking the entire team for their hard work on the Leyland Group project. As a token of the entire Trendsetters family’s appreciation, the team was invited to dinner at the Driskill Grill in the famed Driskill Hotel. On top of that, they were all being treated to a day of adventure at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in New Braunfels.

  After weeks of working so closely with them, Samiah wasn’t sure she wanted to spend time at an amusement park with her teammates, but whatever.
It was a nice gesture.

  Her cell phone vibrated again and Samiah remembered the text she’d missed while in the middle of the presentation. She took out the phone and saw a text from London with a link to a gossip site.

  She groaned as a still shot of her pointing a menacing finger at Craig Walter’s face anchored a headline that caused her eyes to bulge.

  “Oh. My. God.”

  There were two knocks on her door before it opened.

  “Hey, are you ready?” Daniel asked, poking his head in her office.

  Samiah held up her phone, a grin spreading across her face. “Craig is being sought by the police. He’s been scamming seniors out of their social security checks.”

  “What?” Daniel sprinted to her desk, taking the phone from her. “Takes a special kind of asshole to steal money from elderly folks.”

  “The same kind of asshole who dates multiple women at the same time and makes a living out of lying,” Samiah said. She ejected her access card from her computer, slipped it in her purse, and locked up her desk. “But the authorities are on his tail now, so Craig’s cheating and scamming days are numbered. Let’s go to lunch. Today calls for celebratory tres leches from that cute cantina on Brazos.”

  Daniel swept his hand out. “After you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Daniel burrowed his chin deeper into his jacket collar, bracing himself against the brisk wind blowing in from the northwest. The atypically strong, early-season cold front that crawled across the area overnight was the talk at the gas station, Laundromat, and coffee shop he’d visited this morning. Still-green leaves and thick acorns that had been ripped away from nearby bur oaks tumbled along the cracked asphalt.

  Daniel shoved his hands in his pockets as he walked around the front fender of the bright green Kia Soul Quentin had just led him to.

  “What do you think of this one?” Quentin asked.

  “Umm…I don’t know. It seems a bit…loud.”

  “You’ve never met my Ava.” Quentin laughed. “This car is the embodiment of her. Now that Corolla.” He pointed to a tan hatchback three spots down. “That’s more my Emma’s speed. I’m just not sure about buying one an SUV while the other only gets a small sedan. I can already hear the arguments.”

  He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know what to tell you, man. This is uncharted territory for me.”

  Daniel had asked Quentin to come over to the apartment so that he could get his thoughts on a few irregularities he’d come across while looking into the background of a Trendsetters employee who’d left the company under suspicious circumstances last year. When Quentin asked if he could wait until he was done shopping for presents for his twin daughters for their upcoming fifteenth birthdays, Daniel had offered to meet up with him.

  When he arrived at this used car dealership in Kyle, just south of Austin, Daniel thought he’d punched the wrong address into his phone’s GPS. But Quentin had greeted him and told him this wouldn’t take long.

  That was two hours ago. He was certain they’d looked at every single car on this lot.

  “Do your girls know how lucky they are?” Daniel asked as he peered into the Kia’s passenger-side window. “I had to buy my own first car, which is why I rode the bus or subway until I was almost twenty.”

  “Hey, I’m the one getting off lucky,” Quentin said. “Do you have any idea how much a quinceañera costs these days? More than my wedding and my first car combined. Just the damn party favors they wanted to give out would have cost me a couple of grand. At least they’ll have the cars throughout college.”

  “What about this one?” Daniel asked, pointing to another Kia Soul in a nice, sedate cream.

  Quentin shook his head. “I know my girls. They won’t want to drive the same model. I need to find something that’s different but comparable. And it has to be perfect. I don’t want to get this wrong and disappoint them.”

  The guy was in knots. Granted, he’d known Quentin only a couple of months, but Daniel could have never imagined he’d see the formidable, no-nonsense DHS agent in such a state. Was this the kind of thing he was in store for, twisting himself into a tangle of nerves trying to please his future children?

  Future children?

  Where in the hell had that come from? The last time he even thought about children was the day he brought up the subject with Joelle. She’d railed against the thought of having kids. As an only child, he’d considered it, but he’d never had a burning desire either way. He just figured if it happened, great. If not, that was good too.

  When had his feelings changed? And why was he suddenly daydreaming about what life could be in the distant future, with him and Samiah celebrating their impending newborn at a joint baby shower, complete with gender-neutral cupcakes and party favors that cost a thousand dollars? He didn’t even know if Samiah was open to having a pet goldfish, and here he was thinking about kids.

  What was the point when he would be gone in a matter of days? Weeks, if he was lucky. He sucked in a painful breath and tried to quell the overwhelming dread primed to overtake him.

  It was time for the knot that formed in the pit of his stomach to start paying rent. It seemed as though it had taken up permanent residence ever since his call with Dwyer earlier this week. His supervisor hadn’t given him a definitive end date, but Daniel sensed that time was closing in. He figured he had about a week at the most before Dwyer would insist he wrap up this case.

  The idea that he would lose Samiah wrought the kind of agony that would bring most men to their knees, but that wasn’t the only thing keeping him up at night. Nor was it his future at FinCEN, or getting the better of Bryce Stewart’s showboating ass. The thought of leaving Austin before apprehending the bastards involved in this particular scheme galled him.

  And that was before receiving that link from Preston last night.

  It had taken Daniel to an underground message board on the dark web that indicated the money-laundering ring coming out of the area in Latin America where the Trendsetters case was centered was possibly expanding to new territory. Territory that those who peddled in much darker things than a little washed money operated in. Just thinking about what they could face if the drug cartels and human trafficking outfits learned how easy it was to launder their ill-gotten gains through something like Trendsetters’ software caused fear to clog Daniel’s throat.

  Dwyer wouldn’t put as much stock into what they’d read on the message board, seeing as a lot of what came across those were full of conjecture and baseless rumors, but Daniel wasn’t willing to take a chance on this being unfounded speculation. It was imperative he solve this case before he was pulled out of Austin.

  One week. He would give himself one week to get it done. It wasn’t a lot of time, but maybe if he directed more of his focus to doing the work he’d actually been sent here to do, instead of falling in love with a coworker—

  Daniel tripped over an orange traffic cone used to delineate the car lot’s walkway.

  “You okay?” Quentin asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” he replied.

  Falling in love?

  What in the hell was he talking about? He couldn’t be there yet. No way would he own up to something that over the top. Shit, he’d been with Joelle for six years, and it took at least half that long before he’d considered himself in love with her.

  “Hey, you mind if I ask you something?” Quentin asked.

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Why’d you turn down the offer Dwyer made to you?”

  Daniel’s head reared back. “How do you know about that?”

  Quentin just stared at him, one thick brow cocked.

  Dammit, he should have known the two men talked. He’d suspected Dwyer was the one who’d requested the Department of Homeland Security place Quentin in the apartment with Daniel, and not the other way around.

  “He couldn’t share much about what’s happening in Vegas, but from what he did share this seems like the ki
nd of case that would spring you over quite a few rungs of that career ladder.”

  “I told him that I want to see this job through,” Daniel finally answered.

  “He could always send someone else to take over the Trendsetters case.”

  “It’s not that easy. We had to put this case off for months because Trendsetters’ hiring process is so selective,” he pointed out.

  “If Lowell Dwyer needs to make it happen, he’ll make it happen,” Quentin said. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the driver’s side door of a Dodge Ram pickup. “Try again.”

  Daniel squared his shoulders and assumed a matching pose. “What do you want me to say?”

  “That you got in too deep with Samiah Brooks and now you’re not sure if you can get out. Or if you even want out.”

  Fuck. He was obviously as transparent as the windshields on these used cars.

  Daniel dropped his head to his chest and sucked in a breath. His head popped up at the sound of Quentin’s laughter.

  “You find this funny?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Hilarious, in fact. Do you think you’re the first one this has happened to, young buck? How do you think I met my wife?”

  Daniel couldn’t help his grin. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.” Quentin shook his head. “I was still at DEA. She was an informant. Her baby brother got caught up in some rough shit and, being the bold, fearless woman that she is, she volunteered to be used as bait.”

  “Were you the one who took down her brother?” He nodded. “Damn.” Daniel blew out a low whistle. “Thanksgiving must be loads of fun at your place.”

  Quentin’s head shot back with his laugh. “My brother-in-law turned his life around. And he has his big sister to thank for that.” He shrugged one broad shoulder. “My supervisor wasn’t happy, but he eventually got over it. If you tell him, he’ll eventually get over it happening with another one of his agents.”