Pepper Potts

Pepper Potts is the secretary at the Stark Industries plant, and she carries a crush on the man who owns it. Tony Stark hardly notices. She hardly notices anyone else. When he brings his new chauffeur around, she looks straight through the ex-boxer and daydreams instead about how "Mrs. Anthony Stark" might sound. Happy Hogan tells her she is exactly his type. She informs him he is no Tony Stark, and that settles it.

Then the office turns to ice. Jack Frost freezes the guards on his way in, and Pepper does the one thing she can think of. She grabs the phone and warns Stark that the man of ice is coming to turn him into an icicle. Stark tells her to hide. She barely manages it. Frost finds her anyway, charmed by "pretty Miss Potts" and eager to preserve her beauty under a coat of frost. A guard's drawn gun pulls his attention away, and he moves on toward Stark before he can make good on it. Pepper ends the day unfrozen and unnoticed, still waiting for the boss to look up.

Pepper Potts has a theory, and she brings it straight to the boss's door. Riding out to Tony Stark's palatial home with Happy Hogan, she is convinced Iron Man holds some kind of power over Stark. When Happy floats blackmail, she decides they have to find out. Stark laughs off their worries, vouches for his bodyguard, and shows them out so fast it only proves her point. They are barely down the road when the radio reports a deadly ray striking Stark's home, and Pepper orders Happy to turn the car around. The room Stark was standing in when they left is gone. Through her tears, she rounds on the lone survivor, the bodyguard, and demands to know how he walked away. His story about an errand to fetch some papers does not help his case.

When Iron Man vanishes too, Pepper takes her suspicions to police headquarters. There is no trace of Stark after the explosion, she points out, and now his bodyguard has disappeared. The police want proof before they point fingers, so she resolves to find some herself and drags Happy along for the hunt. The next day, outside Stark's private office, she hears someone moving inside and pushes through the door expecting Iron Man. Instead she finds Tony Stark, alive and entirely unbothered, asking what ever gave anyone the idea he was dead. The woman who suspects the bodyguard of everything still has no idea she is looking right at him.