Free Captivated by Nora Roberts Page A

better-endowed children. After all, the imagination was portable, unbreakable, and amazingly malleable. It couldn’t be taken away from you by an irritated adult when you had committed some infraction. It didn’t have to be left behind when you were packed off to some other place.
    Now that he could afford to buy himself whatever he liked—and Nash would have been among the first to admit that adult toys were a terrific source of entertainment—he was still content with the fluidity of imagination.
    He could happily close himself off from the real world and real people for hours at a stretch. It didn’t mean he was alone, not with all the characters and events racing around in his head. His imagination had always been company enough. If he occasionally indulged in binges of parties and people, it was as much to gather grist for the mill as it was to balance out those solitary times.
    But lonely? No, that was absurd.
    He had friends now, he had control over his own destiny. It was his choice, his alone, whether to stay or to go. It delighted him that he had his big house to himself. He could eat when he was hungry, sleep when he was tired, and toss his clothes wherever it suited him. Most of his friends and associates were unhappily married or bitterly divorced and wasted a great deal of time and effort complaining about their partners.
    Not Nash Kirkland.
    He was a single man. A carefree bachelor. A lone wolf who was happy as a clam.
    And what, he wondered, made a clam so damn happy, anyway?
    Nash knew what made him happy. Being able to set his laptop out on the patio table and work in the sunlight and fresh air, with the drumming of water in the background. Being able to toy with the treatment for a new screenplay without sweating about time clocks or office politics or a woman who was waiting for him to snap back and pay attention to her.
    Did that sound like the lament of a lonely man?
    Nash knew he’d never been meant for a conventional job, or a conventional relationship. God knows hisgrandmother had told him often enough he’d never amount to anything remotely respectable. And she’d mentioned, more than once, that no decent woman with a grain of sense would have him.
    Nash didn’t figure that that stiff-necked woman would have considered penning occult tales remotely respectable. If she were still alive, she’d sniff and nod her head smugly at the fact that he’d reached the age of thirty-three without taking a wife.
    Still, he’d tried the other way. His brief and terrible stint as a desk jockey with an insurance company in Kansas City had proven that he would never be a nine-to-fiver. Certainly his last attempt at a serious relationship had proven that he wasn’t suited to the demands of permanence with a woman.
    As that former lover, DeeDee Driscol, had sniped during their final battle, he was . . . How had she put it again? “You’re nothing but a selfish little boy, emotionally arrested. You think since you’re good in bed you can behave irresponsibly out of it. You’d rather play with your monsters than have a serious adult relationship with awoman.”
    She’d said a lot more, Nash remembered, but that had been the gist of it. He couldn’t really blame her for throwing his irresponsibility at him. Or the marble ashtray, if it came to that. He’d let her down. He wasn’t, as she’d hoped, husband material. And, no matter how much she’d altered and stitched during their six-month run, he just hadn’t measured up.
    So DeeDee was marrying her oral surgeon. Nash didn’t think it was overly snide to chuckle at the idea that an impacted wisdom tooth had led to orange blossoms.
    Better you than me, he told the nameless dentist. DeeDee was a bright, friendly woman with a cuddly body and a great smile. And she had the arm of a major-league outfielder when you ticked her off.
    It certainly didn’t make him lonely to think of DeeDee taking that long, slippery walk down the matrimonial aisle.
    He