The Boyfriend Project

The first book in the Boyfriend Project series follows Samiah Brooks, a thirty-year-old Black software engineer at Trendsetters IT Solutions in Austin, Texas, as she rebuilds her confidence after public humiliation, forms unexpected friendships, pursues a long-deferred dream, and falls for a coworker hiding a dangerous secret.

Samiah is preparing for a date with her boyfriend Craig when her older sister, Denise, reads aloud from a Twitter thread live-tweeting a disastrous date. The details match Samiah's own experiences: a rented Mercedes SUV with a cigarette burn, a fake apartment address, and a volcano sushi roll. Realizing Craig has been seeing multiple women, Samiah storms to the nearby Asian fusion restaurant where he is dining with Taylor Powell, a personal trainer. London Kelley, a pediatric surgeon and another of Craig's girlfriends, also arrives. Craig gave each woman a different last name. The three women confront him publicly and walk out together while onlookers record the scene. The video quickly goes viral, and at work, Samiah's coworkers treat the incident as entertainment rather than showing concern.

Samiah, Taylor, and London bond over the experience and decide to take a six-month hiatus from dating to focus on personal goals, dubbing themselves "Hashtag Squad Goals." Taylor plans to grow her fitness consulting business, London will find a hobby outside medicine, and Samiah says she will find a hobby as well. Privately, she has been nurturing a long-deferred idea for a phone app called Just Friends, designed to help people in new cities form platonic friendships, with a commercial element allowing businesses to create curated experiences for matched users. After spotting an advertisement for the Future in Innovation Tech Conference (FITC) in Austin, which offers start-ups venture capital opportunities, Samiah commits to developing the app.

That same week, Daniel Collins starts in Trendsetters' Research and Development Department. He is actually a twenty-eight-year-old undercover agent with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division of the US Treasury Department. Daniel has been placed at Trendsetters as part of a joint task force with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). His mission is to uncover how someone inside the company is enabling a San Antonio-based hotel chain to launder money through Trendsetters' payment software at properties across Central America and the Caribbean. He shares an apartment with Quentin Romero, a DHS agent on the same case. A recent security overhaul has made the company's databases nearly impossible to access, and Daniel's investigation stalls.

Daniel nearly collides with Samiah at the office coffee station and, unlike her coworkers, asks how she is doing. His empathy moves her, and they begin meeting each morning. Their connection deepens through shared lunches and small gestures of attention. Daniel shares that he grew up in Philadelphia in a career military family and served in the Marines before attending Stanford. Samiah confides the immense pressure she faces as a Black woman in tech, and Daniel validates her experience. She tells Taylor and London about Just Friends but withholds the idea from Daniel, wary after a coworker at a previous company once claimed her work as his own.

When an employee named Mike Epsen is injured in a cycling accident, Daniel replaces him on a project for the Leyland Group, a client account. The assignment places Daniel in daily contact with Samiah. He later discovers that Mike worked on the account central to FinCEN's investigation and suspects the accident was orchestrated. Working late one evening, Samiah initiates a kiss that quickly escalates before she pulls back. Daniel briefly withdraws afterward, trying to refocus on his mission, but days later confesses he wants more than friendship. They agree to take things slowly. His supervisor offers him a major case in Las Vegas, but Daniel turns it down, privately acknowledging his inability to leave Samiah.

At Daniel's apartment, Samiah shows him the Just Friends prototype. He calls the concept genius, but she insists on building it herself. She shares a formative childhood memory of finding her father crying after losing his job, explaining how it instilled her fear of failure and need for control. Meanwhile, Trendsetters' CEO, Barrington Jacobs, and Samiah's supervisor, Justin Vail, offer her the role of heading a new Outreach Department focused on community engagement and recruitment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The position would force her to abandon the app before the FITC deadline. With encouragement from Daniel and her friends, she prioritizes Just Friends.

At work, Samiah's coworker Keighleigh Miller, who has a pattern of stealing others' ideas, presents Samiah's implementation plan during the Leyland Group presentation as her own. Daniel intervenes by asking Keighleigh to elaborate, exposing that she cannot explain work she did not do. Samiah steps in to complete the presentation, proving her value. Separately, London shares that Craig is being sought by police for scamming elderly people, providing vindication for the three friends. After weeks of intensive development, Samiah achieves a critical breakthrough on the app, and she and Daniel consummate their relationship. He meets Taylor and London, who support the relationship and reframe the boyfriend project as about finding joy rather than avoiding men.

Then Daniel receives urgent alerts that bank accounts tied to the laundering operation are closing, and intelligence suggests the network could expand to serve drug cartels and human trafficking operations. Samiah's security access has recently been upgraded for a new project, giving her credentials that could access the databases Daniel needs. Facing an impossible choice, he waits until Samiah falls asleep one night, removes her access card from her purse, copies it with a scanner device, and returns it.

Days later, Samiah arrives at work to find DHS agents arresting Trendsetters employees involved in the scheme. She sees Daniel conferring with agents as though running the operation. A coworker tells Samiah that her access card was used to breach the system, and when Daniel catches her eye through a glass wall, his expression filled with remorse, she understands everything. Daniel has already told management he stole her card without her knowledge. Samiah is placed on six-month probation but is not fired. She recognizes the irony: Her reduced workload frees her to finish Just Friends before the FITC deadline.

Daniel returns to FinCEN headquarters in Virginia for debriefing but flies back to Austin to apologize. He waits in Samiah's lobby for hours, but when she arrives, she refuses to hear him out. Over the following week, Samiah works through her anger, visiting Denise and her newborn niece, and admits she no longer blames Daniel for doing his job. Daniel enlists Taylor and London to lure Samiah to the Isamu Taniguchi Japanese Garden at Zilker Park, where she follows a trail of Post-it Notes bearing handwritten messages. In the garden teahouse, Daniel admits he should have asked her permission rather than going behind her back. Samiah tells him she has already worked through her anger, and he confesses he is in love with her. She tells him to kiss her.

In the epilogue, Daniel has arranged a transfer to the local FinCEN field office, and they agree it is too soon to move in together. Samiah presses the submit button to enter Just Friends in the FITC. Their celebration is interrupted when Taylor calls from jail, having been fired and arrested after an incident at her job, setting up the next book in the series.