Off Limits Read Online Free PDF

the higher-ups have spent a couple of weeks panicking among themselves about who let this shit leak.”
    Jim laughs, though it seems forced. All of us are pretending to be unfazed by this news. Drinking more quietly now, but other than that, no one outside of our table would probably be able to tell a thing was wrong.
    Which is fine by me. I’d rather not anyone know how much I’m worrying right now. If I lose this job, it all comes crashing down. The apartment loan I could live with; pay it off as I go. But everything else? The location, the ease it gives me for everything else I need to be doing during the day. . .
    No use panicking prematurely, though. All I can do at this point is keep my head down, do my work, and get on with my day. The chips will fall where they will, and at the end of this, we’ll see how I stand.
    One thing is for sure. I definitely need to knock this case with Chloe out of the park.
    Tomorrow, I decide, I’m going to corner her and make her see sense. If she doesn’t want to work on this with me, then she can ask Paul to reassign her. Otherwise, I’m gonna need her to be all in on this one.
    For both our sakes.

Five

Chloe
    A t 4 :15pm, I start to shuffle together the files I’ve prepared. After a long morning of answering handover questions for Rich about the Daniels’ case, I’ve spent the entire afternoon frantically catching up on everything I need to know about Suzie’s. I think I have a pretty good handle on the thing, but it remains to be seen how this whole working with a partner thing is going to go.
    Especially a partner like Max Davis.
    By 4:20, I’m ready for the meeting. At 4:25, I shove my office door open, a subtle hint.
    By 4:30, I’m rolling my nails across my desktop in annoyance. Really?
    Mr. Slacker breezes in at 4:31pm with a broad smile on his face. Which is, really, unreasonably chiseled. Who has a jawline that solid, or cheekbones that high? His two-day stubble looks more like shadow painted on to accentuate just how sharply his bones cut across his face. And are those glasses ? Sweet mother of all that’s holy, talk about panty-melting. “Got held up in a prior.” He kicks the door shut behind him, and even though I set out a chair on the opposite side of my desk for him, he drags it around to sit right beside me instead. “So, you all caught up now?”
    My jaw clenches, and it takes every ounce of resistance I have not to let anything else visible clench, too. Caught up ? Like I’m the one who’s running behind. “What was it you were telling me about your preparation, before?” I mutter, with a glance at the clock over my office door.
    “Well, maybe if I had a larger window to aim for, I’d be on time.” He stretches his arms out behind his back lazily.
    Ugh. We don’t have time for this. Ignore him and get straight to business, Chloe. “So, the main problem I see is that Suzie never officially registered ‘rub it in.’ She has some protection under the unregistered trademark regulations, but we’ll have to prove that she used it first and regularly, and that this company’s use of it is confusingly similar to hers.”
    “Have you looked at their video yet?” He pulls out a tablet and taps on the screen, flooding it with a full-screen view of a lycra-clad woman on what appears to be a chair stuck on top of a ball vacuum, to my untrained eye.
    I resist the urge to sigh. He’s right; we should view this together, and pick it apart while we can. “Go for it.”
    He taps play, and we lean in over my desk to watch. His shoulder brushes mine for a second, before I readjust in my seat. Don’t touch him, he’s probably contagious .
    He does smell amazing, though. Some kind of deep, forest-like scent, and beneath that, something that’s all him, savory and masculine. I try to breathe in a little deeper without letting on.
    The video starts with the woman on the chair gyrating her hips in a slow grind. The chair rotates beneath her, not just in a