Page 30 of Her Shameful Wedding Night (Corporate Correction)

“Guys,” he said, as his naughty bride looked up at him wildly, “come get her, please, and put her over the table, then lift her gown for me. She has a bare-bottom paddling coming.”

Chapter Seventeen

––––––––

Zoe’s first thought, despite everything of which she had tried to convince herself, all night and all day, was to run away. She cowered back against the door as John and Tony came for her: kind John, tall and blond, and funny Tony, broad and black-haired. The looks on their faces, over the green bow ties that matched her bridesmaids’ dresses, were serious.

Bradley had told them, she could see, about her. During the photographer’s arranging of the wedding party for shot after shot, hadn’t he said,Remember I need your help with the thing we talked about.

Her lips parted as she raised her hands in front of her beautiful wedding gown, to the scalloped neckline that suited her slim figure so well, above the cascade of white that swept to the floor. Her heart raced.

At least they don’t know what I was thinking about, in the church bathroom. Even Bradley doesn’t know that... how I was thinking aboutthem. About...

Zoe gave an involuntary little cry of alarm as the groomsmen, looking so... well, soofficialin their tuxedoes, took another step forward.

About this, really. Almost exactlythis.

“Please,” Zoe said, looking around the little library desperately for some means of escape.

“Zoe,” Bradley said from behind the advancing figures. “John and Tony know that you broke a rule, and they know that we’ve decided to have a traditional marriage.”

She felt the blood rush to her face. She saw that Bradley had his phone out, and had started making a video of this terribly shameful scene. Zoe’s eyes went wide as she looked at the phone in her new husband’s hand, and then she remembered why and how all this had happened. Once the state had this evidence of their compliance—of the very great extent of their compliance—with the program, the settlement would happen. Zoe had the chance to save her family and her town.

Her eyes went to John’s face, and then Tony’s. They had stopped two or three feet away from her, their hands poised and ready to reach to take hold of her arms.

John had just turned twenty—he would finish college in another state and he meant to come to law school in Bradley’s adopted one. He had a standing invitation to join his big stepbrother’s firm, and Zoe dearly hoped he would take it. He would be a great husband for Cindy.

Tony would never leave his old urban neighborhood, it seemed, now that he had returned there with a law degree. He had decided to take maybe a third of what he could make at a tony firm in order to fight the megacorps in the East the same way Bradley wanted to fight them here in the Midwest.

The men her new husband had chosen as his attendants—the ones he had chosen to help him enforce his rules for his bride—looked down at her. Even Tony, the shortest of the three, had a few inches on Zoe. Bradley had told them that Zoe had done something naughty. She bit her lip as she wondered whether he had informed them for exactly what infraction she was to have her panties lowered on her wedding day.

Zoe’s eyes went back to Bradley, and to the phone in his hand. Was it Selecta’s doing, after all? The state’s? Either way, she didn’t have a choice, did she? She had married him after he had told her that she would get the paddle, with his groomsmen to assist, at her wedding reception.

After he had said that she would belong to him in every possible way, clearly intending her to understand that whatever he meant to do after he punished her would shame her just as much as—if not more than—her bare-bottom paddling in her wedding gown.

After he had made it clear with the knowing fingers on his firm right hand that he could make her come to the sound of the shameful news of what would befall her after the wedding.

---