The Holiday Hussy (When the Wallflowers were Wicked Book 11)

by Merry Farmer

  “And if it is merely a concoction of Lord Stanhope’s to take Alice back so that he can sell her in marriage to someone willing to pay a higher price?” Fabian asked.

  His mother looked genuinely sympathetic as she said, “Then I pray you find the proof you need before the end of the day.”

  Chapter 9

  Nothing was going to prevent Fabian from marrying Alice. Not her father and not even his mother.

  “I’ll find all the proof you need, Mama,” he said, fixing his mother with the same stubborn look he’d given her as a boy when he wanted to get his way, then glaring at Lord Stanhope. “I will prove to you that Lady Alice is an angel who has been held in the clutches of a devil for too long.”

  “How dare you?” Lord Stanhope growled, seemingly indignant. There was a flash of fear in his eyes, though, as if he hadn’t expected to encounter a foe as determined as Fabian. Or—which only enraged Fabian more—as if he didn’t believe his daughter was worthy of having a champion.

  Fabian didn’t answer Lord Stanhope’s feigned indignation. He crossed to Alice, taking her hand in his and leading her out of the room before anyone could stop him.

  “Would you like to bathe and change into something fresh before we begin this hunt?” he asked her in a soft voice as he whisked her into the hall.

  “Oh, yes please,” Alice answered in a tiny voice that was both relieved and distraught.

  “We’ll go to your room first, then.”

  They had only made it a few yards down the hall when Lord Stanhope burst out of the breakfast room and chased them, shouting, “Just where do you think you’re going with my daughter?”

  “She is my fiancée,” Fabian insisted, pivoting to glare at the man as they reached the front hallway.

  Lord Stanhope reeled back as if Fabian had struck him. A moment later, he recovered himself enough to say, “Not for long. She’ll be found guilty of theft and cast out by your mother and all good society.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning at his daughter with glee. “I know of a sugar merchant who has been looking for a titled bride. He’s worth a fortune, and with the information I have about the way he cheats his business partners and starves his slaves, I’ll make a fortune off of him in blackmail.”

  Disgust turned Fabian’s stomach. He inched closer to Alice, sliding a protective arm around her waist. “The moment I prove that you are the thief, you will never see or have anything to do with Alice again.”

  He turned and marched on, drawing Alice with him. Lord Stanhope sputtered and snorted, then caught up with them again on the stairs.

  “You won’t be able to prove anything,” he said, a light of cunning in his eyes.

  That was all the confession Fabian needed. Lord Stanhope was certainly guilty of theft and more. He just had to prove it.

  “You know the way your father’s mind works,” he told Alice when they reached her room.

  A harried-looking maid was already at work, taking Alice’s things out of the wardrobe as though she’d been ordered to pack.

  “Help Lady Alice to wash and dress, please,” he ordered the maid.

  “But her father said they were leaving this morning,” the anxious maid said, sending a look that was almost guilty in Alice’s direction. “He said I was to pack.”

  Fabian shook his head. “She’s not going anywhere. Help her to wash and dress.”

  The maid chewed her lip and curtsied, then rushed to Alice to help her out of her wrinkled ball gown. She sent a wary look Fabian’s way. He assumed she felt awkward about undressing Alice with him in the room, but he wasn’t about to leave Alice alone. Not for one second. He turned his back to spare the maid’s feelings.

  “You believe that I’m not the thief?” Alice asked as she undressed.

  “You would never do anything so base,” Fabian said, crossing his arms and staring at a painting of dryads frolicking in the woods. He would have done anything to see the sort of happy, carefree, lustful expression on Alice’s face as those dryads wore.

  “I cannot tell you what that means to me,” Alice said with a sad sigh of relief.

  Fabian heard her move to the washstand at the far end of the room. The sound of water splashing into the basin followed. He caught sight of the maid moving to the bed to select fresh clothes out of the corner of his eye.

  “My father put that brooch in the box on my mantel,” Alice went on. “I saw him do it just before the ball yesterday, though I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time.”

  “I believe you,” Fabian said with a nod.

  He spotted a curious stack of papers on her bedside table and strode over to pick it up. It turned out to be a section torn from a book. The typeface was frilly and delicate, and the title of the chapter on the top page, The Delicate Flowering of Love, made him grin.

  “What’s this?” he asked, picking up the book.

  “Oh!” Alice gasped and sped across the room to take the partial book from his hands. “That’s…it’s….”

  Fabian twisted to grin at her. Her cheeks were bright pink, as were the tops of her breasts and the curve of her backside. She’d rushed to his side without dressing and without drying. A sheen of rose-scented water covered her luscious body. Fabian forgot what he’d asked her, forgot their mission, forgot everything but the need that slammed through him, making his breeches uncomfortably tight.

  It was only the shocked squeak of the maid that kept him from tossing Alice over her bed and fucking her silly. He cleared his throat and settled for kissing her tenderly instead.

  “You’ll have to read aloud to me from this book later,” he said in a low voice, suspecting what kind of information it contained. “For now, we must focus on proving your innocence and your father’s guilt.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said, glancing up at him with wide eyes filled with affection. “You cannot imagine what it means to me for you to stand by my side this way.”

  He couldn’t resist kissing her again, though he didn’t dare risk putting his arms around her. Maid or no maid, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself if he touched Alice too much.

  “Finish dressing,” he said with a smile. “And then we’ll begin our hunt by searching your father’s room.”

  Alice handed the partial book back to him then skipped back to the maid, who held her underthings and watched them with a look of sentimentality. As Alice dressed, Fabian flipped through the pages of her book. His brow shot up more than once at vivid illustrations and lurid descriptions of acts of love. A grin spread across his face and he promised himself they would attempt each and every act described on the pages.

  There would be time for passion and play later. As soon as Alice was dressed and presentable, he took her hand and led her out into the hall once more.

  But as they reached the hall where Lord Stanhope’s room stood, they were blocked.

  “I refuse to allow you into my private chambers,” the bastard himself said, standing in the doorway.

  Fabian pulled himself to his full height, towering over him. “You refuse me entrance into a room in my mother’s house?”

  “Yes,” Lord Stanhope said. “And furthermore, I find it insulting that you would even attempt to infiltrate the sacred space of a guest in the duke’s house.”

  Fabian clenched his fist and opened his mouth to argue, but a small tug on his sleeve stopped him. He turned to find Alice glancing up at him, urgency and inspiration in her eyes. Without another word for Lord Stanhope, he rested his hand on Alice’s back and walked several paces down the hall with her.

  “He’s bluffing,” she whispered when they were far enough away not to be overheard. “He wants you to believe he’s hiding something in his room so you waste time getting past him and checking.”

  “Do you think so?” Fabian asked.

  Alice nodded, peeking past him to where Lord Stanhope was watching the two of them with narrowed eyes. “It is likely that he has someone else working for him, someone who is busy at this very moment, hiding wha
t he’s stolen.”

  Fabian clenched his jaw, frustrated that he had to stoop so low as to deal with someone so cunning. “Where would he hide his loot if not in his own room?” he asked.

  Alice bit her lip and glanced at her father once more before walking away, gesturing for Fabian to come with her. “Have you noticed that he has appeared in strange places, places he wasn’t expected to be, these last few days?”

  “I have noticed,” Fabian said. He took Alice’s hand and picked up his pace. “We should start by searching the ballroom. He’s devilish enough to have hidden what he stole in plain sight.”

  Alice nodded, and the two of them rushed downstairs to the ballroom. The servants were still hard at work, cleaning up after the night’s festivities. It usually took a full day for the ballroom to be set back to normal—or in this case, normal decorated with Christmas greenery, bows, bells, and other festive bits of the season—which would have given Lord Stanhope and any accomplices plenty of time to retrieve hidden loot.

  But as hard and as long as Fabian and Alice searched, they came up empty-handed.

  “It’s not here,” Alice said with a disappointed sigh.

  Fabian hated the worry and defeat in her expression. “The library,” he said. “Your father appeared in the library without warning the morning you attempted to speak to Georgette.”

  “You’re right.” Hope returned to Alice’s eyes.

  They headed out of the ballroom and through the hall to the library at the other end of the house.

  “He could have concealed anything behind the books,” Fabian said, marching toward the shelves at the far end of the room, near the door Lord Stanhope had appeared through. He took a moment to glance into the next room, but the parlor on the other side was dusty and unused. Still, the thought it would be wise to search that room as well.

  “He may not have hidden everything together,” Alice said, pulling books from shelves and feeling behind them. She yelped almost immediately and withdrew her cobweb-covered hand. “I’m not so certain I want to search what I can’t see,” she said in a thin voice, then gulped.

  “You search the parlor,” Fabian said with a smile. “I’ll check the shelves.”

  They spent a good hour going through both rooms with a fine-toothed comb, but once again, they came up with nothing. Fabian’s stomach growled in protest at having skipped breakfast, and his nerves wore thin. They had to find something, anything, to prove Lord Stanhope’s guilt. He would marry Alice even against his mother’s wishes if he had to and whisk her away to his Italian lands—as soon as he was certain they were still his—but he was loath to upset his mother or break with her in any way.

  “We have to keep searching,” he told Alice when she wilted with defeat. “Where else would your father think to hide something that no one would find and that he could retrieve later?”

  Alice brushed a dusty hand along her disheveled hair. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek and she was pink and sweaty with exhaustion, but she was still the most beautiful woman Fabian had ever known. Particularly when she flashed from disappointed to inspired, standing straighter, her eyes shining.

  “The greenhouse,” she said, her smile returning. “He was where he shouldn’t have been in the greenhouse the day after we arrived.”

  Confidence filled Fabian once more. “The greenhouse it is, then.”

  But once again, after more than an hour of searching, all Fabian and Alice found were neglected pots, flowers that needed to be transplanted, and a family of mice that had taken up residence near one of the stoves that kept the greenhouse warm.

  “He’s going to win.” Alice burst into tears as they met up near the display Fabian had made the day after her arrival. “My father is going to convince your mother that I’m a thief and a whore, and he’ll take me away and marry me off to someone horrible.”

  “No,” Fabian said, closing his arms around her and holding her close. “I won’t allow it. I would never allow it.”

  “But how can you stop him?” Alice cried against his shoulder. “Your mother will hate me, and her husband is a duke. If a duke says I have to go, then I’ll have to go.”

  “Then we’ll go together.” Fabian stroked her head, resting his cheek against her hair. “We’ll go to Italy, even if we have to make our own way until my lands are sorted out. I promise you, Alice, I will never let your father come between us, and I will not let him go unpunished.”

  “But how can you stop him?” Alice sniffled. “He always wins, no matter how evil he is.”

  Fabian was ready to tell her he didn’t know, but he would move heaven and earth to make things right, when a small sound near the greenhouse door caught his attention. He twisted with Alice still in his arms to find the maid who had been in her room earlier standing just inside the doorway, glancing this way and that, as though a demon would jump out and devour her at any moment. Instinctively, he knew the maid was the key to victory.

  “You there, Beth, is it?” he called to her.

  “Yes, my lord,” the maid replied. She rushed away from the door and along the narrow aisles of plants to the center of the greenhouse.

  “What is it?” Fabian asked on. He could see in her eyes she’d come to the greenhouse specifically to speak to them.

  “I can’t go on,” poor Beth wailed, bursting into tears the same way Alice had. “I can’t, I can’t.”

  “It’s all right,” Fabian said, using every ounce of patience he had not to grab hold of the woman and shake whatever it was out of her.

  “He’s horrible,” Beth continued to weep. “I didn’t want to do any of it, but he said he’d have me fired and thrown out in the streets if I didn’t do as he demanded. He said he’d make sure I had no choice but to become a dirty whore if I didn’t help him.”

  A rush of triumph pushed through Fabian. Alice must have felt it as well. She stood straight and blinked away her tears.

  “What did my father ask of you?” She stepped forward to put a comforting hand on the maid’s arm.

  “He gave me a sack full of valuable things and told me to hide it in your trunk, my lady,” Beth squeaked through her tears. “He told me to make sure it would be found when you tried to leave.”

  “Where is that sack now?” Fabian demanded, trying not to frighten the poor girl with the force of his anger.

  With shaking hands, Beth reached under her apron, untied something, and drew out a small sack. She handed it to Fabian as though it were poison, then burst into another sob, shaking from head to toe.

  “He said he would blame it all on me if I told anyone,” she wailed. “But I didn’t steal anything, I didn’t. You have to believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Alice said instantly, wrapping her arm around Beth’s back. “I know what kind of a man my father is.”

  The sack was heavy, and when Fabian opened it, all manner of gold and gems winked back at him. There were enough purloined goods in the small sack to sell for a fortune, the fortune Lord Stanhope needed.

  “I believe you as well,” he said, closing the sack and clenching his fist around the top. “We must take this to my mother at once.”

  “I’m so afraid,” Beth continued to weep. “High sorts blame low sorts, like me, all the time. What if the duchess believes Lord Stanhope? I don’t want to be a whore. I’m a good girl.”

  “We won’t let anything happen to you,” Alice said. It amazed Fabian how quickly she had gone from being the one in distress to the one giving comfort with confidence. His heart swelled as he watched her hug Beth and smile at her reassuringly.

  “Wicked men do more harm to themselves than good when backed against a wall,” Fabian said, starting for the door and gesturing for the ladies to come with him. “I have no doubt that, given the chance, Lord Stanhope will incriminate himself when confronted.”

  They headed back through the frosty garden toward the house. Evening was already beginning to fall, and the servants that weren’t still cleaning up from the ball rus
hed about, lighting lanterns and making the decorations adorning the house look every bit as festive as Christmas Eve demanded. The interior of the house was brimming with holly and mistletoe as well, and the delicious scent of supper wafted up from downstairs as they passed one of the servant’s entrances.

  “Find Lord Stanhope and bring him to my mother and the duke at once,” Fabian ordered one of the footmen as they marched through the house.

  The young man nodded and rushed off.

  They found Fabian’s mother, the duke, Matthew, and Georgette in a small, cozy family parlor toward the back of the house.

  “Mama, I have the proof you need,” Fabian announced as he strode into the room, Alice and Beth following. He held up the sack of loot, dropping it into his mother’s lap when they reached the sofa where she sat.

  “What is this?” his mother asked, somewhat uselessly, as she opened the sack. She answered her own question with a gasp.

  “Beth, please explain,” Fabian said, stepping to Alice’s side and sliding a hand protectively around her waist while nodding to the maid.

  “He forced me to help him, my lady,” Beth began, shaking like an ice-covered bough in the wind, her voice barely above a whisper. “Lord Stanhope told me to hide it all in Lady Alice’s trunk so that you would find it there.”

  “Good heavens.” Fabian’s mother pressed a hand to her chest as she handed the sack to the duke.

  Beth continued with her story, but she had only just begun to explain Lord Stanhope’s attempt at blackmail before the bastard himself strode into the room, two of Holly Manor’s largest footmen flanking him like jailors.

  “I have never been so insulted in all my life,” he began before being addressed. “I will not let this attack stand. That little witch is lying. You should hear what she offered to do for me the other night.”

  Beth burst into fresh tears and rushed to the side of the room, as if she would hide behind one of the potted pine trees.

  Lord Stanhope looked as though he would pursue her, but Matthew stepped into his path.