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better to her because she wasn’t going to sleep with him. Meeting gorgeous men she was guaranteed to sleep with had become old hat.
    He said, “Let’s just say that you’re here because I wanted to apologize. Turning down beautiful women is new to me.”
    “This is business,” she said, but her voice was weak. “You can apologize to my producers.”
    “I know I could,” he said, with an irritation that echoed hers.
    “So?”
    “I don’t know. Is it necessary for me to explain my least motivations?” He was glaring at her now, and she remembered his reputation for being merciless with fools and incompetents. But she wasn’t a fool, and she hadn’t done anything incompetent. She hadn’t done anything at all!
    “You did waste my afternoon,” she pointed out. “There’s necessary and there’s simple courtesy. It’s also not that flattering to be described as someone’s least motivation. ”
    They glared at each other for a moment. But as she watched, his eyes softened into an expression she couldn’t read. Maybe it was only confusion; after a minute, he shook his head.
    Then, to her astonishment, he said, “Busted.”
    “Busted? What do you mean?”
    “I am a fan, and I did invite you here from curiosity—if just wanting to meet you counts as curiosity. I wouldn’t have used that word, but it’s close enough. The shoe fi ts, even if it pinches a little.” He was smiling ruefully.
    She found herself smiling back, with a sudden lightheartedness that made her realize that both of them were being fools. And, seen from the point of view of a business meeting, definitely incompetent. “So you have watched the show?”
    “No, that was really true,” he said. “I don’t even have cable.”
    She was surprised to find that she filled with relief. But why would she be relieved? In fact, why would she care one way or the other? Just to say something, she said, “Wow, you really don’t have cable?”
    “No,” he said. “I have to save every penny toward a hostile takeover of Microsoft.”
    She laughed. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”
    “You underestimate me.”
    “Granted.” Smiling at him, she fell into the habit of imagining where she would touch him first, what kind of approach would inflame him most. Then she caught herself and said, with a somewhat forced lightness, “I didn’t know it was so easy to be a business visionary.”
    “Don’t interview me,” he said softly.
    She blushed again. Then she was foolishly thinking about how she had always blushed easily, and how people had mentioned it on blogs, and how it was one of the things that set her apart from other porn stars; it made her reactions seem so real, because they were. And all that time, they were staring into each other’s eyes. It had been at least a minute.
    She said, “I wasn’t interviewing you. I guess I sound like I am sometimes. Bad habit.”
    “You’re right,” he said. “I’m being terrible. I ought to send you flowers to apologize. That’s what a gentleman would do.”
    She imagined receiving the flowers in her dressing room and was hit by an inexplicable wave of loneliness. “Well, don’t.”
    Again, she was confronted by the enigmatic dark eyes, the somber expression she could not fathom. Then he was standing and saying, “I’ll see you out.”
    In the corridor, he told her, seemingly calm again, that he kept a private elevator in the building; even though he deliberately used a small office and disliked superficial signs of hierarchy, it just wasn’t practical for him to appear randomly in public places. “There’s always a person who’s here to replace ceiling tiles, but who has a million-dollar business idea. It’s not so much that I can’t spare the time; I just can’t stand to hear the business ideas.”
    Emily, meanwhile, was strangely affected by the idea of being in the private elevator with him. Her mind was sketching a scenario in which the elevator got stuck and . . . but