She was surprisingly and stunningly responsive; for all that he had spent so very much time imagining what she was like in bed and figuring that she'd be wild, he hadn't really understood what it would feel like to have her immediately lean trustingly into his hand. Or how it felt to have her settle her hand over the part of him that was techno rather than organic, quietly accepting it as part of him - the famous "proof that Tony Stark has a heart" that kept him alive, and kept him quietly separated from everyone else. He couldn't say he minded being better, but when no one else had a glowing pacemaker, it didn't make for easy intimate times.
But her...he trusted her, and that meant more than the idle curiosity about her skin and desire.
"Of course you have rules," he had to say with resigned amusement as he gave up and pulled himself back up onto the rock, reaching out to offer her a hand up as well...mostly to see more of the long legs than to actually help. Pepper probably had a set of procedures for brushing her teeth. "This can be as complicated or as simple as sex can get," he soothed a little. And if she wanted simple, he could work with a simple relationship. Simple sex within it remained to be seen.
"Agreed," he said readily to the first. No one knowing was easy. "So no bragging on Twitter, either," he had to joke. The fallout would be a nightmare; more importantly, Pepper would be embarrassed. And some part of him liked the idea of having her all to himself, without anyone else prying in and chipping in their two cents.
The second point made him hesitate, considering. "But it's still much more efficient if you stay at Stark Tower, and this way, you wouldn't even need to make up the couch," he pointed out. "Consider this your official invitation to not show yourself out if circumstances permit."
Because her third rule actually made him go serious, nearly frowning. "You're not one of them," he agreed softly. But that just made him want to buy her something...on second thought... He studied her a moment, and the idea that rose to the front of his mind was by no means a new idea. He just had kept it on a back-burner until now. He didn't want to buy her something. He wanted to build something. Which neatly broke Rule Three.
"Two and three aren't going to work," he told her. "But I will follow them on the grounds that breaking them also breaks Rule One, the important rule," he conceded. That was the best he could do for compromise.