Her Shameful Lesson (Shamefully Courted)

  Her Shameful Lesson

  Emily Tilton

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Afterword

  Shamefully Courted Series

  The Institute Series

  The Institute: Naughty Little Girls Series

  The Institute: Bad Girls Series

  Bound for Service Series

  Beyond the Institute: The Future of Correction Series

  Corporate Correction Series

  Victorian Correction Series

  Galactic Discipline Series

  More Stormy Night Books by Emily Tilton

  Emily Tilton Links

  Copyright © 2021 by Stormy Night Publications and Emily Tilton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

  www.StormyNightPublications.com

  Tilton, Emily

  Her Shameful Lesson

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  Image by Shutterstock/Parshunas Photo

  Chapter 1

  “You’re going to have to pay for those panties, ma’am,” the store manager said, as Carly began to walk out of the intimates store.

  Carly stopped in her tracks, the blood rushing to her face.

  “I… I don’t know what you mean,” she said, turning to face him where he stood behind the counter of the little shop.

  She couldn’t believe the stupid store manager had noticed her putting the tiny, lacy garment under her pink shirt. He had a patient look on his face, but his eyes had a hard skepticism that made Carly’s heart beat painfully fast in her chest.

  “Under your shirt, ma’am,” he said, picking up the phone.

  Carly’s jaw dropped. Her body seemed frozen in place. “Wait,” she said. “I can… I’ll…” She couldn’t bring herself to admit it or to take the panties out and just… put them back. She couldn’t.

  “Hi… yes, shoplifting,” the manager said into the phone.

  “No!” Carly said. “Wait, please!”

  “Thank you,” the manager said, and hung up. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “The police will be here soon to clear this up.”

  Carly stood there, clutching her purse, holding it against where the lace seemed to be burning her skin, for what seemed a terribly long while. The other customer in the store had left with an apologetic smile to the manager by the time the two officers showed up.

  “Under her shirt,” the manager said to them, very simply, and then they had approached Carly and they stood in front of her.

  “Ma’am,” one of them said.

  I’m not a ma’am, her mind yelled. I just got married a month ago.

  “Yes?” Carly asked timidly.

  “Do you want to lift up your shirt or do you want to tell us something?”

  Carly swallowed hard. With a trembling hand she reached up under the hem of the shirt and pulled out the lacy white panties. The officer accepted them into his big hand, and the sight of them in his possession made Carly bite her lip.

  “I’m afraid we have to put you under arrest, ma’am. What’s your name?”

  She hadn’t heard right, had she?

  “Carly,” she whispered. “Carly Gradin… I mean, Williams. I… I just got married.”

  That officer gave the other one a knowing look that made Carly’s blush much worse.

  Then, before she could grasp that it was actually happening, they had her in handcuffs and had helped her into the squad car. Carly realized with a shock that ‘under arrest’ when said by a policeman in Little Bend, Indiana, meant the same thing it did in a TV show or a movie. She, Carly Gradin Williams, twenty-one years old, newly married, and stunningly beautiful in her own estimation and those of others, actually was under arrest for shoplifting.

  That Carly Gradin—she didn’t think of herself as Williams, really, even though no woman kept her maiden name in Little Bend—the hottest girl in her class at New Modesty Central College had handcuffs on her wrists. As the policeman put his hand protectively on her head to keep her from hitting it on the door frame of the car, she caught sight of her reflection in the store window: petite, with blonde hair in a neat ponytail, dressed in fashion jeans and an adorable pink top to show off her slim figure, Carly Gradin didn’t look like someone who should be helped into a squad car.

  “Can I… can I call my…” Carly hesitated a moment before she said, “husband?” The uncomfortable impression that her hesitation had a good deal to do with her being in the police car, under arrest, arose for a moment in her mind: she saw the panties, on the rack in the store, even seemed to feel the slightly scratchy lace on her fingers.

  She had tried to steal them because… because of what had happened on their wedding night. The realization flashed into her mind, but Carly angrily dismissed it, raising her chin and trying to feel a defiance that matched the movement—trying to push it all away. She hadn’t shoplifted. She hadn’t gotten arrested. It was all a big misunderstanding.

  “You can call him at the station,” one of the policemen grunted. Carly couldn’t even tell if the driver had spoken, or his partner. They didn’t look back at her, and she had no choice but to look straight ahead at the backs of their uncaring heads, if she didn’t want to notice that her hands, in her lap, had shiny metal cuffs around the wrists.

  If she had noticed that, she might have started to believe that she really had taken the panties and put them under the untucked front hem of her shirt, and started to walk out of the store.

  She kept her disbelief going through all of the short drive, and even when, with a burly policeman’s hand on her elbow, she walked into the back entrance of the Little Bend police station. The officer guided her toward one of the three desks in the big room where it seemed she represented the only current event.

  Then she saw that already seated at the desk, across from another policeman, was her husband. He stood up as she approached, a deep frown of concern on his face.

  “Carly?” Jim asked. “Are you okay?”

  “She’s fine, Mr. Williams,” said the policeman with his hand on her elbow. “Just had a little trouble at the intimates shop over on Main Street.”

  “Trouble?” Jim asked, his frown deepening and his voice sounding bewildered. He looked from Carly to the man behind the desk—the chief of police, Carly realized with a surge of shame that she knew must have turned her face scarlet. Looking back at Carly, he asked, “What kind of trouble? When they called me in from work I thought you’d been in an accident.”

  Carly looked from the handsome, bearded face of her carpenter husband to the police chief. She knew she should be the one to say it—she knew she shouldn’t even have turned her eyes away from the man she loved despite the problems they’d had in these first months of marriage. She couldn’t, though; she just couldn’t.

  “Mrs. Williams,” the chief said, “I think you should go ahead and tell your husband what happened.”

  What happened.

  Well, really, wouldn’t Carly have to tell Jim about what didn’t happen? The thing that didn’t happen that had made her go into Little Bend Intimates in the first place, and had made her stand in front of the rack with the laciest, skimpiest of the panties?

  She had pulled off
the rack, and then off the hanger, the tiny white thong panties that she knew a different kind of girl would have worn under her wedding dress. She had looked at them in her hand, and rubbed her fingertips over the delicate lace, unable to put the panties back despite the hot blush that had come over her whole upper body as she thought of the underwear she had worn, on her own wedding day.

  Under all the complicated foundation garments that supported her traditional wedding dress, Carly Gradin had worn blue cotton little-girl panties.

  Something old… something blue. Obviously, she had thought as she had planned every detail of her special day, her lucky blue panties.

  Jim would laugh, she thought. He didn’t care about that kind of thing, really, Carly had felt certain. When they had discussed the shape of their courtship, sitting on the couch in her dorm’s common room late one spring night, the midnight curfew making the conversation rather hurried, he had smiled. He had smiled when she had said, “Is it okay if we wait? Until marriage?”

  He had smiled and kissed her.

  Jim Williams’ smile had called to her across the Little Bend Café the winter before that spring, and she had looked shyly over at him every morning as he sat reading the paper and she got the coffee that kept her going through morning classes. He had noticed, once, and then their eyes had met every day for a week—and then he had risen, as she waited for her coffee, and had asked if she’d like to join him.

  How much better could courtship be, in a New Modesty town? He had come to Little Bend intending to settle down, and very glad to get the work that the corporate subsidies made possible; construction in this college town of a kind that didn’t happen elsewhere these days. They had dated in the approved fashion, and he had registered with the college’s placement office as her approved suitor.

  Carly had told him he could do that, when he asked, because otherwise he wouldn’t be allowed to take her to dinner, or to enter her dorm. She had known the next step, the registration for intimacy, which was the reason senior girls like Carly had single rooms. Jim hadn’t said anything about it, though, and so she had brought it up at 11:58, after a movie date and some discreet kissing on the couch.

  Jim’s hand had rested gently on Carly’s chest, the action hidden from the matron at her desk in the foyer by the turn in his body. It had felt so good. He had smiled, he had kissed her, and the matron had said, “Time, Carly.”

  Jim couldn’t understand why Carly had looked at the police chief, rather than at him. What had she done? Had she shoplifted? The idea seemed so strange and out of character for his young bride that he felt like the floor was dropping out from under his feet.

  Chief Morrison turned to Jim. “Mrs. Williams took some…”

  Jim’s eyes darted to Carly’s face, to see that the blush that had come and gone a moment before had taken firm hold of her entire face. Why had the chief paused?

  “Underwear,” the officer who had walked Carly into the station supplied.

  The chief chuckled in a way that mystified Jim. “Underwear. Yes.”

  “Took it?” Jim asked. “What does that mean?”

  “Mrs. Williams?” the chief asked again, looking at Carly.

  But Carly had turned her red face toward the desk, apparently unable to look at any of the three men.

  “It means,” said the arresting officer, “that the owner of the store observed Mrs. Williams putting the underwear under her shirt and moving toward the door. He—the store manager—called us, and we arrested Mrs. Williams for theft when we found that she did have the… underwear… beneath her clothing.”

  Again that strange hesitation in front of underwear. Jim looked at Carly, whose eyes flicked up to his and then departed again.

  “Carly, is this true?” he demanded, hearing the astonishment in his own voice.

  Why would she possibly need to steal underwear?

  Carly didn’t respond. Her little mouth had twitched to the side in her pretty face.

  “Here’s what she took,” said the officer, putting something—a plastic bag, it looked like—on the chief’s desk. “Store manager says he can’t sell them now, so they’ll have to be paid for.”

  A tiny cry from Carly distracted Jim as he peered at the bag to see what was inside it. She reached her hands out toward the desk, and for the first time he saw that they had actually cuffed his sweet, beautiful wife.

  At the same moment, then, Jim made out the lacy white thong in the plastic bag—the evidence of Carly’s shoplifting—and realized that the Little Bend police had, in his vested opinion, gone way too far. The mixture of confusion and anger that filled his mind and his chest kept him from thinking straight for a moment. He turned to see Carly looking at him again, a heart-rending plea for forgiveness seeming to vie in her face with a much less attractive, almost conniving expression.

  His anger won, for the moment. He had no idea why Carly had done it, though he understood clearly now that his first thought—that it had been a mistake either on her part, the store manager’s, or the police’s—couldn’t be true. The look on her face, and the way she had reached toward the tiny panties in the plastic bag, told him that his wife had intentionally tried to steal them. But they shouldn’t have arrested her, his hot temper said. They had no right to put his wife in handcuffs.

  “Chief, can we get those cuffs off her, please?” he said, doing his best not to raise his voice and mostly succeeding.

  Looking back at Carly with sympathy in his eyes, Jim saw to his astonishment that the conniving, narrow-eyed expression had won. She had a slightly superior smile, now, and with a rush of frustration he understood: Carly had realized her husband had decided to take her side, even though he had seen the evidence and understood her guilt.

  “Sure,” the chief said, nodding to the officer. “But let’s be clear that Mrs. Williams is still under arrest.”

  “What does that mean?” Carly asked. Jim could hear her trying to make her voice sound casual, though he got some satisfaction from how badly she failed: Carly was still scared, and presumably mortified—though her blush had faded now. Jim hoped she still felt embarrassment, anyway; she had, it seemed, committed an actual crime, and the police had had to haul her husband down to the station to work it out.

  “That means that we may well still charge you, Mrs. Williams,” the chief said in a stern voice, “handcuffs or no handcuffs.”

  Carly’s eyes went wide. Jim felt heat creep up the back of his own neck. Apparently Carly would respect the chief of police in a way she didn’t respect her husband. He supposed that made sense, since he didn’t have the same kind of law on his side, but the clarity of the impression still increased his frustration with the girl whose behavior had caused him growing amounts of that unwelcome emotion in the months since their marriage.

  Why had she taken those panties? Her reach toward them, and the one moment of teary penitence when she understood that her husband had seen them, convinced Jim that Carly hadn’t grabbed a random piece of clothing for some thrills.

  Jim’s eyes went to them again, on the desk; skimpy and lacy, almost a G-string, really. The kind of underwear a bride might wear if she wanted to make, well…

  He felt guilty as the thought rose, and contrasted itself in his imagination with his memory of their actual wedding night.

  What a girl would wear if she wanted to make a present of herself, for her husband to unwrap and enjoy for the first time.

  Chapter 2

  “Mr. and Mrs. Williams,” the chief said, “why don’t we sit down and have a talk about what happens next?”

  Carly managed to keep her eyes on the chief as the officer unlocked the handcuffs and took them from her wrists, and then as she sat in the chair across from him, next to Jim. Most important, she managed to keep from looking at the panties in the plastic evidence bag, though every second seemed to make the temptation to peek at them greater.

  Why?

  Why had she taken them, and why did she want to look at them now? Carly
began to wonder, for real, whether something was wrong with her.

  That notion made her forehead crease, and she felt the blush returning to her cheeks, only a few moments after Jim’s sweet defense of her—against the handcuffs, at least—had sent it away, and she had suddenly thought, I might get away with it.

  The idea that Carly Gradin might have something fundamentally amiss in her physiology or psychology brought her back to her wedding night even more urgently than the panties themselves did.

  She saw the hotel room at the luxury resort that represented a sizable share, Carly felt sure, of Jim’s yearly income, though he had never said anything to indicate he had paid very much. The New Modesty program had subsidized a lovely wedding, but their contribution toward the honeymoon was smaller. The beautiful resort near the famous theme park had been where Carly had always wanted to go on her wedding trip, though—and Jim had made it happen.

  Looking at him, seated across from the chief, she seemed to feel his arms around her on their wedding night.

  They had gotten into the hotel room very late at night. In the bathroom she had changed from her cute pink going-away dress to her pretty white cotton nightgown, its lace-accented hem just above her knees. Underneath, still, she had of course worn the powder blue cotton panties.

  She had come to bed to find Jim in his own underwear, lying with the covers pulled all the way down. The contrast between his black boxer-briefs and his hairy, muscular body had made her face go very hot. He had smiled and opened his arms wide.

  “We don’t have to do anything tonight, honey,” he had said. “It’s so late. We’ll wait until morning. Come here and let’s just hold each other for now. I’ve waited so long for this; I want to take my time.”