Page 7 of Disciplining Dana

“Entirely up to you.”

“You know,” he replied after a moment of thought, “I think I’m just gonna go. Give you some alone-time.”

“Okay.” Dana said it stoically, but what she wanted to do was scream. It would’ve been so much easier if for just once—just once—he’d behave like a selfish asshole. Except he wouldn’t, because he wasn’t.

Dammit.

Kurt pulled away from the doorway and crossed the room to her. He took her in his arms and kissed her gently on the forehead. “Night, Dana.”

“Night.” She wanted to sound indifferent, but instead it came out aggravated, because he was aggravating her.

Way to deflect, Dana.

Kurt started to pull away, but Dana grabbed the edges of his sport coat, yanking him back. She tipped her head up and pulled him down into a kiss.

A real kiss. A hard, deep kiss.

She drew back, gazing up at him. “Thank you,” she said softly.

“You’re welcome,” he replied with a puzzled look.

“I promise, it’s not you. It’s just…”

Kurt took a step back, and she let him go. “Don’t worry about it. I’m meeting Gary on Wednesday. I’ll call you after that? Maybe we can have dinner?”

“Sure,” she said, smiling tightly.

He paused for a moment to regard her. “You know I’m always here if you need a sympathetic ear...”

“I know.” And she did. Which made her exasperation with herself all the worse.

Kurt was less than ten minutes out the door by the time she’d turned all the lights out and lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. I shouldn’t be lying here right now. I should be getting my brains fucked out by the one person in my life who actually cares about me. The one person who didn’t see her as simply a prodigy, or a cause célèbre within the field they both worked in. The Rainmaker who consistently brought home the goods, even if her methods sometimes left people—with Kurt foremost among them—shaking their heads.

“Irresponsible,” they said. Rash. Reckless.

Undisciplined.

And that was what drove so much of her anger and frustration of late. Because Dana needed to prove them wrong. She wasn’t any of those things.

Except there were still those thoughts that wouldn’t go away. The ones that plagued her even now as the shifting patterns of shadow and light played across the ceiling and walls of her room.

The thought that maybe they were right.

CHAPTER 2

Kurt

“How much?”

“Two hundred million dollars.”

Kurt shook his head. “Jesus.”

“Now, mind you, that’s only a preliminary estimate.” The older man sitting across from Kurt—Gary Janssen, his and Dana’s boss—held up his hand before continuing. “Could go higher, could go lower. We won’t really know until the mine goes into initial production and we see how the deposit assays out.”

“But…”

The man grinned. “Yeah. Every indication is this is gonna be another big one. A really big one.”

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