Page 4 of Her Shameful Wedding Night (Corporate Correction)

Bradley felt his brow furrow. Jake Davies had said that Zoe’s reaction might surprise him, and it appeared the program officer had understood something Bradley didn’t, yet. Zoe seemed to him not actually tobehorrified, but instead to be trying tomakeherself feel horrified—or perhaps his lovely girl did have a part of her that had grown outraged at this strange treatment by the nurse, but she also had another, different part, which had started to say other kinds of things.

“It means,” the nurse replied with a smile whose patience seemed on the verge of getting thin, “that if you want to do as your future husband has asked, you need to get undressed.”

“Can’t I... can’t I leave my... underwear on?”

The nurse shook her head. “You’re going to learn pretty soon, I think, honey, what happens to girls who can’t follow instructions, but at the moment this is your last chance. Take everything off, including your panties, or go home to your fiancé and tell him you don’t want to be part of the program.”

Chapter Three

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Zoe’s heart beat fasterthan she had thought it ever could. Her right hand, which had like the left turned into a little fist against her hip, against the denim of her jeans as if to keep them on, rose a bit into the air. She meant it to ward off the nurse, she told herself, not to do anything else, to adjust herself anywhere else.

Nurse Carter’s eyes seemed to know, though, into what a dismaying state this terrible conversation had cast Zoe.

Bradley doesn’t know that the exam is like this. He can’t know that this program is making me take off all my clothes.

The thought sounded so absurd in her ears that a part of her wanted to laugh. It was just a medical exam. Doctors and nurses had to be able to look at you, and to touch you, if they were going to figure out how to care for you, right?

Zoe felt a deep crease develop on her forehead as she realized that she didn’t have any reason, really, either to fear this medical exam or—and thinking aboutthismade her mouth twist to the side of its own accord as yet another surge of heat traveled to her face—to feel so strange, down below. Something about it being her fiancé who had sent her here?

About ‘traditional marriage’?

Zoe felt a little shudder go through her whole body at that thought, and she hoped desperately that Nurse Carter hadn’t noticed it. She had to buy some time: she had delayed so long, now, and so she had no choice. She reached her hands down to the hem of her pink cotton top and, turning away from the nurse toward the exam chair, started to raise it over her tummy, then to her shoulders, at the same time kicking off her sandals.

“No bra, honey?” the nurse asked.

Zoe didn’t want to turn her face back over her shoulder. She wanted to put the remark in some category of awkward small talk of the sort that she supposed a nurse could make with a girl soon to marry and join the ranks of adult women who might comment on their peers’ underwear choices.

But something in Nurse Carter’s voice seemed to have more judgment in it than would accompany that kind of small talk. Zoe couldn’t help it: she did turn halfway around, with her shirt up and her little bra-less breasts bare.

“Oh... I... I—” she stammered. “You know, I’m...”

Now she wanted desperately to brazen the moment out, the way she might have at one of the dress fittings to which she’d gone with her best friend and maid of honor Cindy, if Cindy had said something teasing about the size of Zoe’s breasts. Nurse Carter’s eyes, though, had confirmed to Zoe’s dismay that some of the older woman’s judgment both as a nurse and as a wiser, more experienced woman—a mother, probably, and even a matriarch—had gone into the question about Zoe’s underwear choices.

“Yes, dear,” the nurse said. “Your breasts certainly are small, but they’re not small enough to go out in public without at least a halter top on, now are they? Really, you should be wearing a bralette, if not an underwire.”

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