Pepper picked up her phone and dialed. After three rings, the woman on the other end picked up. "Doctor Elizabeth Ross, how can I help you?"

"Hi, Betty," Pepper replied brightly. "I was just checking to make sure our lunch date for today was still on. You'll be there, right?" It was currently nine o'clock that morning, their reservation set for eleven thirty.

"Of course. Will Jane be there as well?"

"Yes, I just called her. Lucky for us, she's in New York already, visiting Thor. She said she'd be delighted to officially meet us, finally. So, I guess I'll see you later, Betty."

"Good-bye, Pepper." Betty hung up and the phone began emitting a dial tone. Pepper set the phone down with a small smile—she was looking forward to speaking with the other women who were dating a 'superhero'. Finally, she could just talk about Tony with friends who weren't constantly asking her about working for him; she was planning on dishing some good, old-fashioned gossip.

She finished getting ready and was about to walk out of her room at the remolded tower in New York City. Unfortunately, she didn't see the stack of paper coming toward her, and walked right into it, causing the stationary to fly in a flurry of white, blue, and pink. "Sorry," she said, knowing who had been carrying said stack of documents.

"It's alright," Tony replied. Pepper began to help picking them up when Tony stopped her.

"Stop," he ordered and Pepper's hands froze. "You're going to pay me back in a different way." Pepper rolled her eyes, wondering what he had planned for her. "Would you like to know what it is?"

"Might as well," she said. "What do I have to do to pay you back?"

"Join me for dinner tonight." Pepper smiled, but was breathing an inner sigh of relief. She expected the favor to be much worse. Suddenly, though, she knew the was going to get a lot more complicated.

"What else?" she asked slyly.

Tony stood and looked at her, eyes twinkling. "You have to tell me the truth the entire time. You can decline answering five questions, but everything else has to be the total truth." Pepper sighed aloud this time. Of course he didn't want just a nice dinner date.

"Fine. What time and where?"

"Just be ready, here, at six o'clock."

As Tony started walking away, stack of papers in hand, Pepper realized something. "How long had you been walking back and forth with those blank papers before I ran into you?"

"Um, about thirty minutes." Pepper shook her head—the dropping of papers and chance to get Pepper to do something for Tony hadn't been an accident. As she suspected, he had been waiting and planned the entire thing.