The corner of his mouth twitched. “I see the chocolate gives you courage.”

“A little.”

“I inherited the company while I was in college. I took it from nothing to a billion-dollar empire in fifteen years.”

Lucky him, she thought, thinking she had nothing to bond with. Scoring in the top two percent of the country on her SATs was hardly impressive when compared with billions.

“To get that far, that fast, I was ruthless,” he continued. “I bought companies, merged them into mine and streamlined them to make them very profitable.”

She counted out the last M &M’s. Eight round bits of heaven. “Is that a polite way of saying you fired people?”

He nodded. “The business world loves a success story, but only to a point. They consider me too ruthless. I’m getting some bad press. I need to counteract that.”

“Why do you care what people say about you?”

“I don’t, but my board of directors does. I need to fool people into thinking I have a heart. I need to appear…” He hesitated. “Nice.”

Now it was her turn to smile. “Not your best quality?”

“No.”

He had unusual eyes, she thought absently. The gray was a little scary, but not unattractive. If only they weren’t so cold.

“You are exactly what you seem,” he said. “A pretty, young teacher with more compassion than sense. People like that. The press will like that.”

She’d been with him, right up until that last bit. “Press? As in press?”

“Not television media or gossip reporters. I’m talking about business reporters. Between now and Christmas I have about a dozen social events I need to attend. I want you to go with me. As far as the world is concerned, we’re dating and you’re crazy about me. They’ll think you’re nice and by association, change their opinion of me.”

Which all sounded easy enough, she thought. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to actually act nice? This reminds me of high school when a few people worked really hard to cheat. They could have spent the same amount of time studying and gotten a better grade without any risk. But they would rather cheat.”