4. Man of Fortune
Some time later, JARVIS informed Pepper that Mr. Stark "requested the pleasure of her company in the kitchen." Which was where she found her boss perched on a stool at one end of the breakfast bar, eating fried rice out of a white cardboard carton with a pair of chopsticks. Pepper again puzzled over the absence of any formal dining setup, even though there was plainly enough room.
"I wasn't sure what you liked, so I got a little of everything." He gestured to a large array of cartons, neatly lined up on the counter—enough food for four people, at least. "Plates are over the sink if you want to get fancy."
He seemed to have regained some sense of the proprieties, and had bathed and put on clothes—a fitted white t-shirt and a well-worn pair of jeans. His dark hair, now free of last night's styling products and this morning's potassium bicarbonate, was thick and slightly wavy, and tumbled boyishly over his brow. Pepper felt a sudden, startling impulse to run her fingers through it.
She supposed it wasn't all that shocking: considered objectively, Tony Stark was one of the most strikingly handsome men she had ever seen in person, up close. This was simply a fact.
Not only that, but he was in good shape; the weight room was clearly not just for show. This was another fact.
She was willing to bet that he put considerable time and effort into his appearance, and that he was well aware of the effect he had on women—not a known fact, but a solid hypothesis with plenty of evidence to support it.
It was probably going to take a little while for her to adjust, that was all.
He smiled winningly at her, and Pepper reddened, embarrassed. Instead of wasting time ogling her boss and drooling over his art collection, she should have been learning his routine and—at the very least—picking up his lunch. She felt woefully out of practice as a PA; she was far too accustomed to setting her own agenda.
"This is very thoughtful of you, sir. How much do I owe you?" she asked.
Stark looked vaguely insulted. "Potts, do you read the financial pages, like, ever?"
Pepper decided it was time to push back a little. "Of course I do, Mr. Stark. But I was also head of payroll, until recently. I know your annual salary. And I've seen how you live." She smiled, trying not to let on that her heart was pounding in her ears. "Let me know if you'd like me to get my purse."
It was a gamble: he could laugh, or he could fire her for the second time in a week. For a moment, he blinked at her, looking a bit stunned—it had probably been a long time since anyone had spoken to him like that.
Then he nodded, and chuckled appreciatively, and she knew she'd made the right choice.
Pepper fetched a plate and helped herself to rice, steamed vegetables, and kung pao chicken. Her boss, meanwhile, continued to eat straight from the cartons, sampling each one, so deft with the chopsticks that they were practically an extension of his fingers. That was why there was no dining table, she realized: Tony Stark didn't usually entertain dinner guests at home.
They ate quietly for a few minutes before he up-ended another carton, spilling a small pile of pre-wrapped fortune cookies onto the counter. "When you read your fortune, you have to add 'in bed' to the end of it," he told her.
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why? Because. That's what you do." He cracked a cookie. "'Your success will astonish everyone.' In bed." He flashed her a wicked grin, and she felt her cheeks getting warm. "Agreed. Let's see… 'Endurance and persistence will be rewarded.' In bed. Well, I'd say that's a given. Wouldn't you?"
Pepper smiled politely, but refrained from comment. She could tell that anything other than a neutral response would just encourage him.
Stark flicked a fortune cookie across the counter to her. "Your turn."
With some trepidation, Pepper snapped the brittle biscuit in half. "'You will surmount considerable… hardship,'" she read, willing herself not to stumble on the last word.
"In bed," he added for her. "Good one." There were two cookies left—he slid one over to Pepper and opened the last one himself. "Huh."
"What does it say?" she asked, in spite of herself.
He shrugged. "It doesn't really work. It says, 'It takes a man of iron to forge a heart of steel.'"
"I like that," Pepper mused.
He extended his arm, the slip of paper fluttering between two fingertips.
"I don't think these are transferrable," she remarked wryly, but let him deposit the fortune in her hand anyway. When his fingers brushed against hers, something tightened unexpectedly in her stomach.
She opened the last one, popped the cookie into her mouth, then almost choked on it as she read.
"Don't keep me in suspense, Potts," he said, imperiously.
"It's blank," she told him, feeling herself blush. She was a terrible liar. Fortunately, he didn't know her well enough yet to know that. "What do you think that means? That I have no future?"
"Either that, or someone at the factory is asleep at the switch." He held out his hand again, palm up. "Let's see."
Pepper decided a change of subject was in order. "Your art collection is unbelievable," she told him, as she surreptitiously slid the incriminating fortune into her pocket. "I'd say you have at least 4.5 million dollars sitting down there—and that's a conservative estimate. Is it catalogued?"
He gave her a blank look, which she assumed meant no, then went back to picking all the shrimp out of the lo mein.
"Mr. Stark, in order for art to be a real investment, you can't just buy it and store it and wait for the money to roll in. You have to curate it. Each piece should have an accession number, and they should be stored in a temperature-controlled—"
He sighed loudly. They had apparently reached the event horizon of his interest in the conversation. "You do it," he told her.
"What?"
"You do the…" He made a vague, sweeping motion. "The art. Just do whatever needs doing, I'll pay for it."
"Don't you even want to look at any of it? Maybe put some of it up around the house?"
"Sure, why not? Pick out a few good ones for me. After we eat. I don't know how they do things over in payroll, but around here we don't work on our lunch breaks." He poked his chopsticks into the carton of steamed veggies, snagged a large piece of broccoli, and ate it in a very self-satisfied manner.
Regardless of his numerous shortcomings as a boss, Pepper couldn't help but appreciate the fact that Tony Stark appeared to have an excellent grasp of the concept of work/life balance.
After lunch, Pepper called a fine arts storage service, and arranged for a managed unit where the rest of the pieces could be catalogued and stored. She called a delivery company to collect and transport the crates. She even called a couple of galleries, and offered them the opportunity to exhibit pieces from the private collection of Tony Stark—a small gesture that couldn't hurt his reputation.
Pepper spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through the photos and paintings, figuring out which pieces would suit the furniture and décor in the house. Once she had chosen the finalists, she set them up in the various rooms where she thought they should be displayed. Then she gave her boss the tour.
"You have a good eye for this kind of thing," he told her. "I love how it all goes with my stuff."
"You bought most of it," she reminded him.
"You're right." He grinned. "I'm awesome. Thanks for reminding me."
Pepper didn't even try to restrain her eye-rolling this time.
To her surprise, Stark insisted on hanging the paintings immediately—it clearly gave him great joy to be able to get out his toolbox and climb around on the furniture in his workboots. Pepper thought about suggesting that he take them off, but after all, it was his house. If he wanted to wreck his $12,000 couch, so be it.
Pepper had to admit that there was a certain satisfaction to be gained from watching him: put a hammer and a level in his hands and he moved quickly and decisively, demonstrating the high degree of precision and care that was generally lacking in the performance of his duties as CEO. His energy was boundless, his smiles infectious.
Most surprising of all, he asked intelligent, thoughtful questions about the pieces, and listened without condescension to her answers. He knew a lot more about art, on a purely instinctive level, than he'd given himself credit for; he could pick out the subtler elements of form, and colour, and even appreciate medium and technique. He was, after all, a designer, with a defined sense of style. His apparent lack of interest in his own collection had stemmed from a profound disinclination towards the administrative side of things.
Pepper had now encountered several different incarnations of Tony Stark: the irresponsible playboy, the privileged heir, the obsessive genius. None of them had particularly impressed her.
But this man—the one who compared an artist's use of chiaroscuro to the application of light transport theory in three-dimensional rendering; the one whose brown eyes softened momentarily when he looked at a painting, before explaining that his mother had picked it out on her honeymoon in Venice—Pepper had never met this Tony Stark before.
She liked him.
They were discussing Barnett Newman when he suddenly trailed off, mid-sentence, at the precise moment Pepper was bent at the waist, collecting a framed painting from the floor. She knew, without even glancing behind her, exactly what was happening.
"Tony," she said, low and warning.
When she turned to face him, he was grinning. "You used my first name," he remarked.
"You were staring at my ass," she retorted.
He nodded.
"I need you to stop doing that. It makes me uncomfortable."
"Yeah, well, it makes me uncomfortable when someone far more qualified than me to be the head of a company calls me 'Mr. Stark.'"
She gaped at him. Pepper had spent years cultivating the kind of poise and assurance that was Tony Stark's birthright: it amazed her that someone could be so supremely self-confident, and simultaneously so openly vulnerable.
"I did my homework on you," he explained. "I mean, technically, JARVIS did my homework, but I programmed him, so… yeah. Obadiah chewed me out when I hired you for this job. He told me it would be a criminal waste of your talents to have you picking up my drycleaning and making me coffee. That got me curious, so I did a little research."
Pepper's cheeks burned.
"What the hell are you doing here?" he asked.
Her own answer surprised her: "I like a challenge."
He grinned. "I can definitely give you that."
"You hired me," she pointed out. "You obviously had some kind of plan."
He laughed mirthlessly. "I think you're giving me too much credit."
"I don't think you give yourself enough."
"Potts, I know you haven't been around me much, but modesty is not something I'm generally accused of. I'm a brilliant inventor, and I'm fun at parties, but as a CEO, I'm aware that I'm sub-par. That no one takes me seriously. I'm not Obadiah. I'm not my father. That's not going to change."
"No, it's not. But I still think you could be a pretty good CEO, if you actually tried."
"Are you saying I don't try?" he challenged.
"I think you purposely set the bar low enough that you don't ever have to disappoint anyone."
He appeared to consider this for a moment, then slowly nodded, tacitly acknowledging the truth of what she had just said.
"I'm not really into scheduling," he told her. It was an apparent non sequitur, but Pepper understood. "I completely lose track of time when I'm working. I forget about my appointments, and I'm always running late."
"I can help with that."
"I keep weird hours, I avoid paperwork, and I don't like to use speaking notes." He was ticking the individual facts off on his fingers now.
She nodded. "I can help with that, too."
"I don't like to be handled—if I sense that you're trying to get me to do something, I'll usually do the opposite."
"I've noticed."
"Yeah, I get the sense that not a lot gets past you."
She inclined her head gracefully, accepting the compliment as nothing less than her due.
"I sleep with women. A lot of women." He smirked. "Can you help with that?"
"It doesn't sound like you need much help," she observed dryly.
"Point taken. Feel like you're in over your head yet?"
"Not at all."
"This is actually very cathartic," he told her. "This is probably the most honest conversation I've had with a woman, ever. At least since my mom died. Oh, that's another thing. I talk about my dead parents."
"So do lots of people."
"Do you?"
She nodded. "Sometimes."
"I'll probably try to sleep with you."
"Why?"
She expected a flip answer, but he stopped short, giving the question serious consideration. "Why not?" Pepper was already drawing breath to answer when he cut her off with, "Okay, spare me the itemized list. Just answer one question: why do people climb Mount Everest?"
"Egotism?"
He snapped his fingers. "Nope, try again."
"Insanity?"
"Nuh-uh. No. Because it's there. I like a challenge, too."
"That's very flattering. Did you try to sleep with Gregory just because he was there?"
"No, but he didn't look as cute in a skirt as you do. Seriously, Potts, those legs are killer."
She smiled indulgently. "Be that as it may."
"I can be very persuasive."
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Stark: I think you'd have better luck scaling Mount Everest."
"Here's one other thing you can help me with," He took a step closer, right into Pepper's personal space. She stood her ground, held his gaze, and waited. A beat went by, then another. "You can take home the rest of that Chinese food in the fridge," he said at last. "I think it's time we called it a night."
Pepper drew herself up to her full height. "Will that be all, Mr. Stark?"
"Yes, that will be all," he said, and touched her shoulder in a move that wasn't quite a caress. "Ms. Potts," he added, smiling.
And so it was that Pepper headed home from her first day of work with a head full of personal trivia about Tony Stark, and a handbag full of leftover takeout.
It wasn't until Pepper was unpacking the contents of her handbag into the fridge that she remembered the fortune in her pocket. She fished it out and read it over before tossing it in the small drawer where she kept spare rubber bands and twist ties and a tin of pocket change. Not because she thought it meant anything, of course—there had to be tens of thousands of identical fortunes given out every day in California alone. But she thought it might be worth hanging onto, just for the sake of posterity.
It read, The great love of your life is sitting across from you.