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made Ally’s stomach rumble. Betsy and Rudy were tossing their shells on the floor, but Mitchell had a neat little pile in front of him. Ally shook her head. Poor Mitchell was so out of his element here. She wondered again why he’d come.
    His explanation was full of holes. Mitchell was efficiency personified, which meant he tied up loose ends like nobody’s business. In the four months since Grammy’s death, he’d quietly taken care of everything, barely needing Ally’s input. Yet when she’d announced her trip to Alaska, he’d suddenly come up with a bunch of issues demanding her attention—bogus things like whether she intended to take Grammy’s seat on the board of the Historic Lampposts Preservation League.
    He’d tried every conceivable argument to convince her to stay, from terrible weather reports to dire warnings about grizzlies hiding behind every tree. She’d told him the part about the grizzlies made her more eager to go, although bears were hibernating now. In the end, she’d left, because Mitchell had no power to stop her.
    But he’d followed her up here, and right away, too, as if his presence were absolutely required. She couldn’t figure it out, unless… he had a secret crush on her. She hated to think that was true, because she didn’t want to be forced to deal with it. But a secret crush was the only thing that made any sense.
    She was still just schnockered enough to ask him. Walking straight to the table, she quickly sat down before either Mitchell or Rudy could leap up and hold her chair.
    “Welcome back!” Rudy said with a huge grin. “Have some peanuts.”
    “Thanks.” She grabbed a handful. “Hi, Betsy.”
    Betsy smiled as she kept drumming on the table. “Hi, yourself.”
    “Enjoying Clyde’s performance, I see.”
    “Not so much. He’s a terrible show-off, don’t you think?”
    “I think he’s pretty good. A lot better than I was a little while ago.” Ally checked on Mitchell from the corner of her eye, looking for telltale signs of infatuation. She wondered how infatuation would manifest itself in a guy like Mitchell. Buying an open-ended ticket to Alaska was darned incriminating, she had to say.
    “Well, I suppose he has a sense of rhythm,” Betsy said grudgingly. “But I don’t know why he has to put on a demonstration all the time.”
    Probably because he wants to get into something belonging to you, Betsy. He thinks demonstrating his sense of rhythm will get you hot.
“I think good rhythm is important,” Ally said, hoping to help Clyde’s cause.
    “I suppose. Too bad he’s so full of himself.” Betsy continued to drum on the table and wiggle.
    Ally thought Betsy was a lot more interested in Clyde’s sense of rhythm than she wanted anyone to know. And as Ally listened to Rudy’s off-tempo clapping, she had new insight into why he might have lost his lady love. Bad rhythm could be extremely distracting. She couldn’t tell whether Mitchell had a sense of rhythm or not, because he was just sitting there.
    Or was he? Looking closer, she noticed that his forefinger was tapping, ever so gently, on the table. In perfect time. Well, now. Chalk one up for the giant Popsicle. And speaking of Popsicles, she admitted to mild curiosity about what size Mitchell was packing under those geeky pants he wore.
    That’s where four Irish coffees could land a girl, speculating about equipment she had no intention of using. But she did need to find out Mitchell’s intentions while she still had some Dutch courage left.
    After fortifying herself with more peanuts and deliberately throwing the shells on the floor, she turned to him. “Mitchell, lean over here a minute.” No point in humiliating the man in public. Between Clyde’s metal taps crick-cracking on the bar and the blare of the jukebox, no one would hear her if she kept the conversation low.
    “What?” Mitchell looked wary as he came closer.
    “Don’t worry. I’m not going to sock you in the