Zoe’s body seemed tofreeze, where before it had felt as hot as the inside of a volcano. She tried to wriggle again, not sure whether she hoped Bradley would keep holding her in place or would let her go. When she found that his left arm did not relax, that he still had her wrist doubled behind her back, that his right hand remained possessively on her bottom, her hips made another little thrust and another tiny whimper came from her chest.

“Please...” she started, not having any idea what might emerge from her mouth next. “No more spanking, okay? My... my bottom hurts so much, now.”

Bradley’s right hand stopped its soft rubbing and squeezed her punished cheeks, very gently, then. The burning left by the spanking—so hard and so fast, Zoe had thought, especially at first, that she could hardly understand what was taking place—seemed to radiate out, into her entire body but worst of all forward, into the place where she had made the wet spot in her panties at the clinic.

She let out a sob, and suddenly she didn’t feel sure that she actually even wanted him to end the spanking. Her fiancé seemed like a different person tonight. Bradley Corvan had somehow become the kind of man who makes rules and enforces them: the kind of man who metes out the discipline his wife has earned, in the knowledge that he does it for her own good.

But, Zoe wondered, feeling her brow crease,has hechanged, really? Or has he grown into the man I thought he might be? The kind of man Nurse Carter clearly thought he would be for me... the kind of man I need.

“You heard me, Zoe,” he said now, slowly and softly, but with a note of authority in his voice that sent a shiver through her whole body. “If you want to get up and go start telling people the wedding is off, I need you to say so, and I’ll let you up. If you don’t, I’m going to stand you up, but just so I can take down your jeans and your panties for your real punishment.”

All she had to do was not say anything. But if she didn’t say anything, he would...

Zoe swallowed hard. Would she speak? Now? In a second? In five seconds, when Bradley started to use his broad-shouldered strength, his thick arms, ropy with muscle, to set her on her feet, so he could for the very first time pull down his bride’s pants?

It didn’t take five seconds, though. Bradley waited two seconds, maybe, and then even as Zoe wondered whether she would speak when he began to stand her up he had already done it in a powerful motion. Shewasstanding again, with his enormous hands on her waist, on the waistband of her jeans.

“Stop,” she said, softly and almost dreamily, but she didn’t think he would, and she didn’t let herself consider the awful question of whether she even wanted him to stop.

Bradley didn’t stop. He deftly unbuttoned her jeans and lowered the zipper. He returned his hands to her hips, underneath the hem of her pink top, and she felt his thumbs come inside, next to the bare skin and the elastic waistband of the panties into which she had changed when she had gotten home from the clinic. Thinking of them, knowing Bradley would see them in a moment, her face burned even hotter than her bottom.

But he paused, then, and spoke to her, his voice so deep and so stern that Zoe thought she might just vanish out of mortification: at her refusal to make dinner, which would have been so easy, at her disrespectful words, at being put over her fiancé’s knee for a spanking, and most of all at what he said.

“I didn’t think that the first time I undressed you would be to learn a lesson about obedience and respect, Zo. I think I made a mistake not being clearer about my needs, and what I think the expectations for a long-term relationship—and even more for a marriage—should be. We’re going to fix that oversight tonight. But first I’m going to make sure you understand that from now on you are to respect my wishes, or next time you’ll be a lot sorrier.”

He looked up into Zoe’s face, which she knew must have gone bright red, calmly and steadily as he spoke. Her fists clenched and unclenched, and her heart raced. His thumbs just inside her jeans, his hands on the denim, made her feel faint, as if she didn’t even know where she was.

“Now you’re going to say,yes, sir, Zoe,” he said, even more slowly and seriously. “You don’t have to call mesirwhen I’m not disciplining you, but when you go over my knee you will do so.”

Zoe closed her eyes and she felt tears form in their corners and well out through the shut lids.

“Are you ready to have your bottom bared for punishment, Zoe?” Bradley’s deep voice said. “Are you ready to learn how to be a good girl for your husband’s firm hand?”

She nearly swooned, then, like an old-fashioned heroine. He knew what had happened at the clinic, and he must know, too—maybe even better than Zoe did herself—what it meant. The thought of telling him to get lost, that the wedding wouldn’t happen, vanished, replaced by the idea that she had to get it over with. Her fiancé, a man who knew how to keep a girl in line, had decided she needed a spanking over his knee with her panties down; now she had no choice because if she didn’t do as he said he would make her sorrier. He would buy a paddle or a strap, and he would put her not over his knee but over the chair, or the stool, or the arm of the sofa, and he would make sure she didn’t sit comfortably for a day or two.

Her breath came in little pants. Her knees trembled. She had to get it over with.

“Yes, sir,” she whispered, and Bradley started to pull down her pants.

“Oh,” he said, and she knew he had seen the panties. The white lacy panties Zoe had put on when she had gotten home from the clinic: one of the three pairs she had bought for the wedding night and the honeymoon, not sure which ones she would wear when—not even sure in fact that she would have the courage to put them on at all, since she had never worn real lingerie before, and her gray thong had been until then the naughtiest underwear she owned.

Bradley kept pulling her jeans down until he had them around her knees. Zoe peeked through nearly closed eyelids, then, to see that he had begun to study the place between her thighs that the lacy front of the thong panties covered. The cotton of her shirt hung down far enough to obscure a good deal of the region from sight, but she knew he had noticed the whiteness and the design.

Had he realized that his fiancée had been bared, down there, that day, by the nurse’s clippers? That the pussy he meant to uncover for the first time had no hair on it because Nurse Carter thought a bride should look fresh and tidy for her bridegroom, in the place she must have his hardness when he decided the time had come to make a woman and a wife of her?

“You’d better take your top off, Zo,” Bradley said in a thick voice. “When your husband disciplines you, it’s not a time for modesty. It’s important that I see what I like to see.”

A sob broke from her throat. Where had his words come from, these words that seemed to look down deep into a part of her soul she had hardly even known she had. Swiftly, trying not to think about it, she obeyed her fiancé: she took the hem of the pink shirt and pulled it off over her head, all the way, so that she could drop it to the floor and Bradley could see the lacy white bra that matched the panties. Zoe had followed Nurse Carter’s advice, though she had never gotten used to how bras felt, encasing and presenting her little breasts.

“You’re so beautiful, Zoe,” Bradley said softly. That made her open her eyes, to see him glance up from her pussy to her face. “And you’re being such a good girl, now.”

Zoe bit her lip as he moved his right hand around behind her, and took both her bottom-cheeks into his long fingers, holding her backside as if to remind her that she had just been spanked over her fiancé’s knee and would very soon return there for the rest of her obedience lesson. His eyes widened a little as he felt the narrowness of the panties’ slender back, how it left the little apples of her bottom so bare to his touch.

“Yes, sir,” Zoe whispered again. She swallowed hard, then, because she saw Bradley’s left hand begin to move, very slowly, toward the place where her bare thighs rested against the thin black wool of Bradley’s dress trousers. The hand turned upward.

“You had an interesting visit to the clinic, didn’t you?” he asked softly, his eyes traveling between the place where his fingertips had nearly touched the lace that Zoe knew now must reveal, through delicate mesh, that her pussy no longer had the golden curls he had never actually seen but only touched the two or three times they had gotten that far.

Her own eyes went, without volition and with a flare of heat to her face, to the place between his legs where his cock lurked in his pants. She had touched it, once, in the dark, and it had seemed to leap in her fingers. Zoe had felt anxious, and taken away her hand, and Bradley had not forced the issue, had not taken her hand and put it back there as she had almost wished he would.