Page 11 of The Madam’s Highlander

Tessa was behind the bar, as usual. Her pretty smile wilted somewhat when she saw him.

A menacing stab pierced Ewan's heart and his knees went soft.

Tessa pointed to the office door mutely.

Sounds faded away, muffled as if plunged underwater. His heartbeat, however, echoed in his ears in heavy thumps.

He opened the door without knocking and found Madam Freya perched in a chair beside the hearth, staring into the flames. A whisky bottle sat on the desk before the uncomfortable chair he'd sat in before. Beside it was one glass.

“My mother.” He could barely speak the words.

Freya pulled her attention back to him. There was no playful coyness to her expression now, not even the glower of hatred. Her full lips were thinned with severity, her smooth brow puckered.

“Yer mother is safe,” Freya said slowly.

Relief buckled Ewan's knees and pulled free the rope of tension constricting the air from his chest. And yet...and yet there was more.

“But...” he pressed.

“Please sit,” she said.

“I dinna want to sit.”

She rose and met his gaze levelly. “Sit.”

He lowered himself to the chair. Freya closed the door, which he'd left open in his haste, and strode toward him. She pulled the top from the whisky with an audible pop and poured a sizable portion into the cup.

“Yer mother is safe,” she repeated. “But yer home is gone. It's been burned.”

Ewan stared at her for a long moment, his ears having heard but his mind still processing. “The servants?” he asked.

Freya lowered her eyes. “Dead.”

Ewan was glad then for the hard chair beneath him, for the support to hold him up as his world fell away.

Dead.

Their faces came to him, carried on the wings of fond memories from a sad childhood made brighter only because of their love. The cook who'd always seemed to know the hardest days and made them softer with special treats baked for him, his mother's lady's maid who had innocently flirted with him as a young man and bolstered his fledgling confidence, the steward who had pulled coins from his ears and soothed his mother's worries through all those uncertain years. The stable master who had filled in as a father after Ewan's own had been denounced and killed.

All dead.

Ewan stared forward, his body and mind numb, yet his heart was an explosion of blinding pain. It was almost worse having everything be so numb, so that he could feel the hurt in his chest that much more. “How?”

Freya was silent a beat too long. Ewan jerked his gaze up at her. “How?”

This time she met his stare. “Redcoats.”

Redcoats. The English.

The very men he worked with.

The hurt in his heart erupted into something blazing and far more powerful - rage.

Freya shifted closer, an action Ewan hardly registered. Her hand curled around his, soft and warm against the clammy chill of his own. She pushed something against his palm, something cool and slick.

A glass.

“Drink.” The command was quiet but firm.