Page 2 of Her Shameful Wedding Night (Corporate Correction)

“Oh, no,” she said quietly.

“The refinery?” asked the other girl, peering at Zoe’s handheld in what seemed a friendly, rather than a nosy, way.

Zoe turned to her, and seeing a sympathetic look, said, “Yeah. My dad works there.”

The girl, a pretty redhead, said, “Mine too—and my fiancé. They say it’s these lawsuits.” She sighed. “What can you do? Lawyers.”

Zoe’s whole body had gone hot, though, and she opened her Sudoku app. She entered random numbers, pretending to be paying attention, but she felt huge relief when the door next to the reception desk opened and a middle-aged nurse said, “Delilah?”

Behind the nurse a third young woman emerged through the door, seeming rather flustered, even as Delilah put away her handheld and stood up to follow the nurse.

“Delilah, just go to room one there on the right,” said the nurse, holding the door open. She turned to the girl who had just reached the door to the clinic corridor, a platinum blonde whose cheeks showed a very deep pink. “Gretel, remember what I told you, please,” the nurse said with what seemed to Zoe a very meaningful emphasis. “Your husband knows what’s best for you.”

If Zoe thought her own cheeks had burned before, at the receptionist’s disapproving attitude and at the other girl’s casual, terribly unjust connection of Bradley’s profession with the troubles at the refinery, this crumb from the nurse’s mouth as to the nature of medicine carried on in this suite set her whole face ablaze. The numbers in the Sudoku made even less sense now, and she could only feel grateful that now that she was the only girl in the reception area she didn’t need to pay as much attention to pretending to fill in the puzzle. She felt sure that her sense of the receptionist’s eyes scalding her with a continuous ray of mortification must be wrong—that the woman must have work to do, and couldn’t be looking at Zoe. When she dared look up during the long minutes during which she supposed Delilah must be having her exam, she found the woman gazing back at her, the same expression—now almost of disgust—in her eyes.

At last the door opened, and Delilah emerged, her eyes fixed on the floor and a fiery red in her cheeks. She went straight to the outside door and through it, as if hit with an electric cattle prod. Zoe felt herself frown in alarm as she turned to watch the other girl’s departure, but then the door to the exam rooms squeaked again, instead of closing, and she heard the nurse’s voice say, “Zoe?”

Trembling, and angry at herself for the stupidity of trembling, she got up, saying, “Yes,” and at least seeing a patronizing sympathy in the iron-haired woman’s face. “Room one, dear,” the nurse said as Zoe passed into a medical suite like every one she had seen, from her pediatrician to the eye doctor to the gynecologist she had started seeing two years before.

The door to room one stood open, left that way it seemed by Delilah, so Zoe entered to find a gynecological chair with its stirrups up. That made her heart beat faster, the way it always seemed to do even at her own doctor’s office. Something about doctors plus stirrups seemed to stir irrational fears. That the room for thismarriage subsidy examshould contain such a chair didn’t have to mean what it seemed, she reasoned. Surely they just need to weigh her and take her blood pressure?

The nurse closed the door behind her. “I’m Nurse Carter,” she said. “I’ll be doing the first part of your exam, just like an ordinary visit to the doctor. Go ahead and take off all your clothes, Zoe.”

Chapter Two

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Through every one ofthe five meetings he had that morning about the Selecta case, Bradley’s mind kept coming back to the medical exam for the marriage subsidy. He had a problem at work, more generally, with keeping his mind off Zoe—though ‘problem’ didn’t really represent the way he thought about it. His gorgeous, innocent-but-eager, five-foot-four fiancée made him smile at the strangest times—especially in the toughest meetings, when an image of her smile would drift up from his imagination and he would have to suppress any facial sign of the elation at having asked her to marry him. If there were aproblem, it lay simply in his tendency to look like a love-addled fool, incapable of taking on the largest corporation in history.

Today, however, the hours of court prep and the conference calls stretched on until Bradley felt he could just barely remember what food had tasted like the last time he had had any, let alone what Zoe’s arms felt like around his shoulders or the warmth of her body as she snuggled against him on the couch. He could usually focus on work like a laser despite the occasional mental flashes of Zoe-joy, but together with his usual low-grade need to feel his sweet girl’s body next to his, the knowledge he had sent her to the clinic for the marriage subsidy exam seemed to have made concentration impossible this morning.

He took the five minutes he had between a status update with his paralegals and a call with the lone investor in the case to click over to the program’s website and reassure himself he had done the right thing in starting the application for the subsidy. Of course the vague language on the net didn’t help much, but it reminded Bradley of the details of his conversation with the program officer the previous week, and that recollection did reassure him—mostly, at any rate, because he still didn’t know how Zoe would react when she found out about the aspects of the state government marriage subsidy program that hadn’t made it onto the website.

“Mr. Corvan, you seem like precisely the kind of man this program is meant to help, on paper,” the program officer, who had introduced himself as Jake Davies, said.

Bradley frowned at his handheld. “On paper?”

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