He’d been friendly enough on Messenger, too, once he’d got over the initial shock of Shona getting in touch, and been persuaded that arranging the meet-up was a good idea. Maddie did speak about her dad, he’d told her. Not in a particularly flattering way, but she spoke about him. She regretted the state of their relationship and wished it could be better.
Granted, she had never actually said as much, but Anderson had read between the lines.
Which was the main reason he didn’t want to look outside, in case it turned out that he’d completely misread between the lines, and they were now trying to kill each other with dessert spoons.
He and Shona filled a few minutes with idle chat. Anderson asked how the drive down had been, what the weather was like in Inverness, and what time they were planning to set back off up the road.
Shona asked if Anderson had ever seen the Richard Donner cut of Superman II.
He hadn’t.
A waiter passed then, carrying a tray of drinks towards the front door. Shona leapt to her feet and intercepted him before he could make it all the way.
“Wait! Hold on! Those are ours,” she said.
The waiter regarded her with suspicion until Anderson produced the receipt and held it up as evidence.
“We’ll take it,” Shona said, grasping the edge of the tray. “It’ll be safer that way. Probably.”
The waiter, who had absolutely no idea what she was on about, and no desire to find out, happily let her take the tray, then headed back to the kitchen. Shona took a deep breath and met Anderson’s eye.
“You ready?”
He drew in a deep breath, then nodded. “Ready.”
“Right, then!” she said, backing up to the door. “Let’s do this!”
She bumped the door open with her bum, stepped out onto the veranda, then turned with the tray. She hadn’t known what to expect, but had braced herself for a range of possibilities that went from ‘stony silence’ to ‘wanton destruction.’
Instead, she found them sitting there, side by side. Not smiling, exactly, but not not smiling, either. They both turned as she and Anderson stepped out of Nardini’s, and the similarity of their matching expressions proved their blood-relative status better than any DNA test ever would.
“Well, well, well,” Logan said. “Here’s the very bastards now.”
Shona side-eyed Anderson. “I don’t see any blood,” she said in a stage whisper.
“You owe me five quid,” Anderson told her.
“No blood,” Maddie said. She glowered at her husband. “Well, not until I get you home, anyway.”
“Oh. Promises, promises,” Anderson said, then he wilted like a dying flower as both Logan and Maddie glowered at him.
“The fuck’s that meant to mean?” Maddie asked, beating her dad to the punch. Possibly literally.
“Nothing. I just… I panicked,” her husband admitted.
Shona placed the tray on the table and divvied up the drinks—tea for Logan, coffee for the youngsters, and the milkshake for herself.
Taggart slid off Maddie’s lap when the bowl was placed on the ground, and then failed to hide his disappointment when it turned out to contain water and not food. He lapped at it forlornly, then lay down in the shade beneath the table.
Once the drinks were deployed and the tray stashed under the table beside the dog, Shona took her seat. She looked from Logan to Maddie and back again. “So, you’re not going to kill us, then?”
“Not out in the open like this, no,” Logan said. “Too many witnesses.” He took a sip of his tea, looked over the rim of the mug at his daughter, then went for it. “We… Shona and I… We were thinking of maybe hanging around for the rest of the day. Maybe going for dinner somewhere. If, you know… I mean, I’m not sure what your plans are, but if you wanted to join us, you’d be…” He sighed, shook his head, then set his mug down. “I’d like you to come to dinner. Both of you.”
Anderson’s hand slipped over Maddie’s. He gave her a nod of encouragement.
“Is it somewhere nice?” she asked. “Last time you took me out to dinner it was to Pizza Hut.”
“You liked Pizza Hut!” Logan protested.
“I liked Pizza Express.”
Logan rolled his eyes. “Same thing.”
“It’s not remotely the same,” Maddie countered.
“I mean, they both do pizza, so they definitely share some similarities.”
“Jack.” Shona tried to squeeze the word into a gap in the argument.