Divine Evil

viewed in primitive paintings, wasn't her idea of visual stimulation.
    “A seelo!”
    She glanced over, sighed. “I think it's called a
silo
, though I have no idea why.” Angie settled back while Jean-Paul practiced the pronunciation.
    She hadn't minded the drive, really. Jean-Paul was deliciously sexy behind the wheel of a car. She smiled to herself-a purely feminine look of satisfaction. Jean-Paul was deliciously sexy anywhere. And he was all hers.
    The fact was, she'd enjoyed driving down the turnpike, windows open, Cajun music blasting. She hadn't felt obliged to offer to take a turn at the wheel, knowing that her husband rarely had the opportunity to put on his cute little cap and leather gloves and let it rip.
    Just past exit nine on the Jersey turnpike, they'd gotten a ticket, which Jean-Paul had cheerfully signed-right before he pulled out into traffic again and cranked the Jag up to ninety.
    He was happy as a pig in slop, Angie thought, then closed her eyes. She was even thinking in rural analogies.
    The last hour of the drive had made her nervous. All those fields, hills, trees. All that open space. She much preferred the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan. A mugger she could handle-and had-but a rabbit dashing frantically across the road sent her into a panic.
    Where was the noise, for God's sake? Where were the people?
Were
there any people, or had they crossed through the Twilight Zone into some version of Orwell's
Animal Farm?
    What the hell was Clare thinking of, actually choosing to live in a place where you had cows for neighbors?
    She was restlessly twisting the thick gold links she wore around her neck when Jean-Paul gave a whoop and swung the car to the shoulder. Gravel splattered and smoked. “Look! A goat.”
    Angie dug in her bag for Excedrin. “Jesus, Jean-Paul, grow up.”
    He only laughed and leaned past her to stare through the passenger window at the ratty gray billy goat who was chewing grass. Billy looked as unimpressed as Angie. “You were very fond of goat when I gave you the angora wrap for Christmas.”
    “I like my suede jacket, too, but I don't want to pet a sheep.”
    He nuzzled his wife's ear, then sat back. “When is the next turn?”
    Angie shot him a look. “Are we lost?”
    “No.” He watched her gulp down two painkillers and chase them with Perrier straight from the bottle. “I don't know where we are, but we can't be lost because we're here.”
    His logic made her wish she had Valium instead of Excedrin. “Don't be perky, Jean-Paul, it only depresses me.”
    Angie took out the map and Clare's directions so that they could study them. Her annoyance faded a bit as Jean-Paul massaged the back of her neck. As always, he sensed precisely the right spot to touch.
    He was a patient man and an enthusiastic one. In all things. When he had met his wife, she had been the assistant of a rival art dealer with ambition glittering in her eyes. Cool and remote to the most casual of flirtations or the most overt of suggestions, she'd been an irresistible challenge to his ego. It had taken him six weeks to convince herto have dinner with him, another three frustrating months to ease her into his bed.
    There she had not been cool; she had not been remote.
    The sex had been the easiest hurdle. He had known she was attracted to him. Women were. He was artist enough to recognize that he was physically appealing, and man enough to play on it. He was tall with a body he cared for religiously with diet and training. The French accent-and his often deliberately awkward phrasing-only added to the attraction. His dark, curling hair was worn nearly shoulder length to frame his bony, intelligent face with its deep blue eyes and sculptured mouth. He wore a thin mustache to accent it and to keep it from appearing too feminine.
    In addition to his looks, he had a deep and sincere affection for the female-all of them. He had come from a family of many women and had since childhood appreciated them for their softness, their strengths, their vanities, and their shrewdness. He was as sincerely interested in the elderly matron with blue-tinted hair as he was in the statuesque bombshell-though often for different reasons. It was this openness with women that had led to his success in bed and in business.
    But Angie had been his one and only love, though not his only lover. Convincing her of that, and of the advantages of a traditional marriage, had taken him the better part of two years. He