He jabs the desk phone. “Cara! Call an ambulance!” he barks before rounding the desk. “It’s okay. I’ve got you, Baby.”
With one giant sweep of his arm, he sends everything on his desk crashing to the floor, then lifts me up to sit on top of it.
“Tate,” he hisses, taking my hand between his and surveying the bleeding cut. “Fuck.”
He lifts my finger to his mouth and slides it past his lips, sucking it gently. His warm tongue swirls over it, cleaning off the blood, before holding it inside his mouth.
“What are you doing? It’s just a cut.”
He pulls my finger out, grunting something, before sliding it back in and against his tongue again. He yanks his tie free, then slides my finger out again so he can wrap the silver silk around it.
“What’s happened?” Cara appears in the open doorway,her eyes bouncing off the mess on the floor before locking onto us.
Sullivan doesn’t look her way. His attention is fixed on wrapping my finger with his tie.
“Miss Miller cut herself. She’s a hemophiliac. Where’s the damn ambulance?”
“I’ll go and call it.”
“You haven’t fucking called it?” Sullivan roars, snapping his face toward her.
She withers under his death glare. “I didn’t know. I came to see what was happ?—”
“You’re fired!” he snaps. “Get your stuff and get the hell out.”
“Sullivan,” I say.
He sucks in a deep breath through his nose, his jaw so tense that his teeth are probably being ground away to nothing.
“It’s okay,” I say, placing my uninjured hand to his cheek and turning his face to mine.
Wild, panicked blue eyes meet mine.
“I’m not a hemophiliac. And it’s just a cut. See?”
I unwrap the silver silk from my finger and show him my finger. It’s bloodied, but the flow is already easing, showing just a small cut on the tip.
He puffs out a ragged breath, studying my finger with a frown. His lower lip has a smudge of blood on it.
“I saw your medication when it fell out of your bag.”
“It was my father’s.”
Sullivan flicks his attention toward a sniveling Cara.
“You can go, Cara. We’ll discuss this later.”
She flees, and as awful as she’s been to me, I feel sorry for her. Being on the receiving end of Sullivan’s wrath is not a place I’d wish upon anyone.
“Your father?” he asks, holding his tie back against my finger to stem the remaining bleeding.
“Yes. It’s why he lost his job at the engineering firm. He got injured and almost died. They fired him saying he was unfit to perform his job. I hired him a lawyer. He’s fighting it.”
“You paid for a lawyer yourself?”
“Yes.”
He blows out a breath. “Jesus, Tate. You should have told me. I’d have helped you.”
