For a large swath of his afternoon, Daniel hadn’t been able to focus on anything other than what it meant that Samiah didn’t want her family to know about him. Apparently, she didn’t want her friends to know about him either. Not that he wanted to intrude on her girls’ night out Friday rituals—he would decline if she ever asked him to tag along—but she had yet to suggest he stop by to meet Taylor and London. Was he mistaken in thinking that a woman would want to introduce her new boyfriend to her friends?

Unless she didn’t consider him to be her boyfriend.

They hadn’t discussed official labels or anything like that. And just because Joelle had paraded him around like a live-action G.I. Joe doll to her friends didn’t mean Samiah would do the same. Maybe he was reading too much into this.

No matter what, the fact that he wasn’t meeting her parents, or her sister and brother-in-law, or even her friends, was a stark reminder of where things actually were between them. Fuck, it was a reminder that there shouldn’t even be anything between them at all. What excuse could he give if anyone back at FinCEN discovered what he’d been up to with Samiah? It was in only the rarest circumstances that any kind of romantic involvement with a subject was allowed—those cases where an agent’s cover had the possibility of being blown.

Samiah’s tangential affiliation with Hughes Hospitality didn’t come close to justifying what he was doing. Allowing himself to get in too deep with her could lead to detrimental consequences.

“You’re already in too deep,” he said with a groan.

He needed to break this case open and get the hell out of Austin. It was the only way he could see himself giving up the drug that was Samiah Brooks.

Daniel forced himself to put her out of his head. He wouldn’t make any more attempts to access the database tonight, but he still had legitimate work he could be doing right now, both for Trendsetters and for FinCEN. The final specs for the Leyland Group’s new customer management system were due within the next week. And, back at FinCEN, Preston had asked for help on a case that was tied to one Daniel had worked on last year.

He forwarded the old emails and voicemails to Preston, then returned to working on the back-end architecture for the Leyland Group’s WLAN design. Their team had been told just this morning that Leyland’s upper management decided to go with this configuration, which, coincidentally, was the same one Hughes Hospitality had used for their wireless local area network. Suddenly, being placed on this team worked in his favor. He now had access to information that had been previously out of his reach.