Logan chuckled. Down on the ground, Taggart raised a paw and put it on his knee, reminding him he was under there, and that the ice cream appeared to be going spare.
“You got a dog,” Maddie stated.
“Aye. I mean, no. I mean, sort of,” Logan said. “Not by choice.”
“You never let me get a dog,” his daughter reminded him. “No matter how much I asked. Too much hassle, you always said.”
“And I was right. He’s a bloody nightmare.” An idea struck him and he perked up in his seat. “You want him? You can take him home with you, if you like. All his stuff’s in the car.”
“No. You’re alright.”
“When I say he’s a nightmare, that’s an exaggeration, he’s actually very easy to care for. He’d fit right in. You’d get on like a house on fire,” Logan said, really trying to close the deal. “He’s very low maintenance.”
“We live in a flat, and we’re both out all day,” Maddie said. “It wouldn’t be fair.” She glanced under the table. “Anyway, he looks a bit daft.”
“Everyone keeps saying that,” Logan said, leaning back so he could get a better look at the animal. “I just think he looks like a dug. They all look daft.”
“Lassie didn’t look daft,” Maddie pointed out.
“True,” Logan conceded. He looked down at the dog’s lolling tongue and uneven ears. “Not sure I’d trust this bugger to get me out of a well, right enough.”
“What’s his name?” Maddie asked.
“Taggart.”
She laughed at that—a dry noise at the back of the throat. “Aye,” she said. “Of course it is.”
“One of the guys I work with—Ben, you remember Ben?”
“Of course.”
“He reckons he’s gay.”
Maddie frowned. “Ben reckons he’s gay?”
“Aye.”
The lines on Maddie’s brow deepened as she thought this through. “But he was married to Alice for years.”
“What? No, not… Ben’s no’ gay. He thinks the dug’s gay.”
“Ben thinks the dog’s gay?” Maddie said, incredulously.
“Aye.”
“And is it?”
“That’s no’ really any of my business,” Logan reasoned.
“I suppose not,” Maddie agreed. She reached under the table and patted Taggart on the back of his head. He turned immediately, tail wagging, and scrambled gracelessly up into her lap, making a meal of trying to lick her face.
“He likes you,” Logan said.
“I’m not bloody taking him. You can get that idea right out of your head,” Maddie replied.
Logan watched her with the dog for a while, then voiced the thought that had been in his head since he’d found out she was married.
“I would have come.”
Maddie looked up from Taggart. “Sorry?”
“To the wedding. I wouldn’t have let you down. If you’d invited me, I would’ve been there.”
“You think I didn’t invite you because I thought you might not turn up?”
Logan nodded. “Aye. Because I know that in the past I’ve—”
“That’s not why I didn’t invite you,” Maddie said.
Logan blinked. “Oh. Isn’t it?”
“No!”
“Right. I see.” He tried to recalibrate his thinking on the matter, but couldn’t. “Why didn’t you invite me, then?”
“Because I don’t like you,” Maddie said, then she flinched and shook her head. “Don’t. Didn’t. I don’t know.” She sighed and looked down at Taggart, who seized the opportunity to lick her on the chin. “I was angry.”
“About what happened in Inverness?”
“About everything! About two-and-a-bit decades,” Maddie retorted. “But yes, you almost getting me raped and murdered didn’t exactly help matters, let’s put it that way.”
“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. I’d never let anything happen to you.”
“But that’s just it! You did. You let that happen,” Maddie said, the pitch of her voice rising an octave or more. “You think because you stopped him—you think because you swung in just in the nick of time—that everything’s fine. That all’s well that ends well. That I’m fine. But I’m not. Because it doesn’t work like that, Dad.”