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life-or-death grip on the seat, George wrapped his arms around himself. Coming from Los Angeles, he thought the place was damned cold. Pia seemed immune. She was still dressed in her jogging clothes and a sweatshirt thrown over her shoulders.
    “Berman. Zachary Berman,” Pia yelled back. The car’s windows were down, and the wind was whipping around her jet-black, nearly shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a pair of cycling sunglasses that curved around the side of her head. When George hazarded a glance in her direction, he saw a distorted reflected image of himself. His hair was standing on end and his face was twisted horizontally.
    “What’s he like?”
    “I don’t know much about him,” said Pia, telling a white lie. Despite what she wasn’t telling George, Pia didn’t know a huge amount about Berman above and beyond what was in the press. He was a kind of international playboy in the mold of a few other more famous, relatively young, highly successful business entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Larry Ellison. But she did know that although he was married with kids, it was, in his words, an open marriage.
    The reality was that Zachary Berman had happened upon Pia in one of Nano’s several cafeterias and was actively pursuing her. At first Pia had allowed herself to have a few casual dates with the man because she was truly impressed with what he was accomplishing in nanotechnology and the promise he represented in medical nanotechnology. But when he started to get personal, and she learned about the Berman family in New York, she put an end to it, to Zachary’s chagrin.
    Then it became a problem. As a man unaccustomed to hearing the word
no
from a woman, he’d become a pest, as far as Pia was concerned. Even if he hadn’t been married, she wouldn’t have been all that interested in any kind of a relationship. She was in Boulder to work and recover from the emotional trauma she’d experienced in New York City. Besides, she didn’t even know if she was capable of a relationship even if he was not the driven, selfish man she thought he was. Over the years, Pia had become quite knowledgeable about her social limitations.
    “Is he single?” George continued.
    “No, he’s married with two kids,” Pia shouted back without elaboration, hoping the topic would end there. She didn’t want to trouble George with the information that Berman was attracted to her and that his attentions had gotten to the point of being bothersome. Also in the back of her mind was the gnawing discomfort that Berman was due back that very day from an important business trip that had thankfully taken him away for almost two weeks.
    “How old is he?” George persisted.
    “Late forties, something like that.” Pia clenched her teeth. George could be tedious about such things.
    “I think I saw a picture of him,” George said. “It was in
People
magazine, taken at the last Cannes Film Festival. He has one of those big yachts.”
    “Really?” Pia responded vaguely, as if she weren’t interested, and she wasn’t.
    “Was he involved when the company, as you said, gave you this car?”
    Pia massaged the leather steering wheel. She didn’t like where the conversation was going but didn’t know how to prevent it, short of saying she didn’t want to talk about Zachary Berman, which would have conveyed the message she was trying to avoid. George was behaving exactly as she remembered he did—he was always full of questions that probed her private life. He had fussed around Pia’s apartment for twenty minutes before she could get him to leave, with his litany of questions about whether or not she was looking after herself properly with no appropriate food in her refrigerator, suggesting that perhaps she wasn’t actually living there. Pia knew George was trying to find out if Pia was seeing someone.
    “Actually, he was involved. He had found out that I had been cycling to work and wanted me to have one of the company