As they sat there chatting, the pact she’d made with Taylor and London gnawed at her conscience. This was so unfair. How could she have known just one day after that impassioned, hungover speech she’d made in her living room that Daniel Collins would walk through the doors at Trendsetters and become her scrumptious new obsession?

After the shit she’d been through when it came to dating, how could anyone expect her to turn a blind eye to the undeniable attraction brewing between them?

It had been hard enough to resist him after their near kiss on the hiking trail. Now that they were working on the same team? Forget it. Resistance was for exercise bands and political activists. Not for a single woman who had to work with this delicious human being day in and day out.

But, dammit, the fact that she didn’t want to resist him was exactly why she should!

Her pact with Taylor and London was only the tip of a giant iceberg of reasons why she should absolutely fight this attraction to Daniel. She’d just had a mental debate over whether she had the time to devote to new friends. How much more of her energy would a brand-new relationship cannibalize? And that didn’t take into account the overtime she would have to put in over these next few weeks while working on this new project.

No. She couldn’t do it. She could not allow herself to get caught up in anything beyond the lighthearted flirting they’d engaged in so far. Anything else would take way too much time away from working on Just Friends. Now that she was done with her feasibility assessment and had moved solidly into the prototype development, every spare moment was precious.

Of course, when it came to reasons she should absolutely, without a doubt, not even consider dating Daniel Collins, the boyfriend project pact she’d made with Taylor and London, and the time she needed to work on her app, paled in comparison to the big, fat elephant in the room.

In this actual room. This room where they worked together. As coworkers!

There was no formal policy prohibiting interoffice relationships, but Samiah got the sense it was frowned upon, especially between supervisors and subordinates. She could recall the gossip floating around Trendsetters not long after she arrived, about a former supervisor who’d started a relationship with a programmer. There was never an official reprimand, but that gossip had lasted for months.

She wasn’t technically Daniel’s boss, but as team co-captain on the Leyland Group project, it placed her in a position of authority. She could not ignore the potential hit her reputation would take if word got out that she was getting extra friendly with the hot new guy at the office.