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pushed him back. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

      He looked into her glistening brown eyes, saw that loving look on her sweet young face and answered a resounding, “Sure. Marry me, Cate Falco. Be mine forever. I’ll give you all the gold and diamonds in the world.”

      “I don’t want all the gold and diamonds in the world. A single strand of white gold and diamonds would do just fine. But we’ve only been dating for three months.”

      “Since when did dating-time have anything to do with marriage?”

      “I don’t know. Isn’t it a rule or something? Aren’t we supposed to get to really know each other first? I mean, we haven’t even spent a whole night together, or had one decent argument. Aren’t those the two main ingredients of happy marriages?”

      “So that’s it…sex and arguments? That’s what makes a happy marriage?”

      “I think so, and maybe a few thousand other things, but you obviously don’t have time for the list. At least we should know…”

      He kissed her again, then pulled back to continue on his quest.

      “What’s to know? You’re the girl with the magical touch, and I’m the guy who needs a little magic in his life. Sounds like the perfect match to me.”

      “You’re the one who’s crazy. You know that?”

      “You could be right, but let’s get married, anyway.”

      She stared into his eyes as if she were searching for the right answer, then pulled him in tight and rested her head on his shoulder.

      He hugged her even tighter, hoping for the right answer.

      “So,” she whispered.

      He waited while she tickled his ear with her tongue, sending shivers right through him. He pulled his head away and looked at her, hoping, praying even, for a yes.

      “So?”

      Cate beamed with a smile that lit up her whole face. “So, yes. Of course I’ll marry you. How could I not?”

      He picked her up and twirled her around shouting, “Yes. Yes. Yes,” as she snapped another picture of his smiling face.

      “Yes, Cate, yes,” he said out loud.

      Two burly men from a rescue team picked Rudy up from the snow. “That’s some dream you’re having, Mr. Bellafini. But you need to relax now. You’re going to be fine.”

      “Sure,” Rudy said. “Relax. Like it’s easy with your foot pointing in the wrong direction. Look at that. You should be on this stretcher, dude, trying to relax.”

      A woman from the same team, with black satin hair and pure brown eyes, a Latin angel, told him to breathe normally through the tubes poking into his nostrils. Rudy smiled and shut up long enough to finally lose all consciousness.

       1

      “IT’S NOT YOU . It’s me,” Cate Falco said while sitting across from Joey Delano in the trendy dinner house on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. She watched as he tried to cut his rare steak with a blue cast wrapped around two of his fingers and halfway up his right arm.

      “Come on. That’s such a line,” he said trying to get a grip on the knife.

      “I know, but it’s true. It really is me.”

      He put his flatware down and looked at her. “You’re breaking up with me?”

      “Yes,” she answered in a cool, calm voice.

      “But why? I thought we had a good thing going.”

      She thought this would go easier, but he looked seriously confused. “I’m thinking that since you met me, you’ve broken two fingers, fallen down a flight of stairs, got stuck in an elevator for five hours, sprained your wrist and got hit in the balls with some kid’s baseball. I can’t date you anymore. I’m a hazard to your health.”

      Cate sat back in her chair, getting a little weepy-eyed. She really liked this guy. He was funny, cute and got her weird sense of humor, but she just couldn’t let it go on any longer.

      “But they were all accidents. You weren’t even there.”

      “I know, but believe me, this is for your own good.”

      “I don’t get it.”

      “You know how everybody in Chicago believes the Cubs are cursed? Well, it can happen to people, too. I’m love-cursed and you’re just experiencing the results.”

      “You expect me to believe this?”

      Cate looked into his sweet brown eyes and said, “Yes.”

      “This is bullshit,” he said.

      It was at that exact moment that the waitress tripped while walking by, nearly dropping her tray of drinks in his lap.

      “No, this is real. You’re the last in a long line,” Cate said. “I’m giving it up.”

      “What? You’re not going to date anymore?”

      “That’s absolutely right. I’m embracing celibacy. I hear it’s quite calming.”

      He stared at her for a long moment, then stood up, pulled some cash out of his pocket, slipped it under his plate and left.

      Cate let out a heavy sigh.

      THE NEXT MORNING Cate and her father, Ted, sat in their kitchen eating breakfast and reading the Chicago Sun Times. Ted ate soft-boiled eggs out of the shells, really-bad-for-you bacon, and vitaminless white toast, while Cate crunched on her completely-good-for-you bowl of organic Optimum power breakfast cereal with flaxseed, soy fiber, dried blueberries and 500 mg of OMEGA-3’s.

      They at least agreed on the coffee—Starbucks house blend, strong and black.

      “Will ya get a load of this?” Ted announced with a flourish, tossing part of the paper across the table.

      “What?” Cate asked as she picked up the sports section.

      “Look whose mug is on the front page,” he said while tightening the belt on his plaid robe. It was chilly in the large kitchen and her father not only wore a wool robe over flannel pajamas, but he liked to wear a white stocking cap on his balding head…to keep the heat in.

      Cate took the paper, and there, spread across three columns was Rudy Bellafini, lying prone in the snow, looking absolutely awful. Aside from the fact that his body was the shape of a pretzel, his hair was way too long—shaggy and over his eyes, with a little curly flip just under his right ear—Cate wondered if the slight mustache and almost beard was due to a lack of shaving or if he had done it on purpose, for that scruffy-Hollywood effect.

      She caught herself lingering over the picture a little too long. Cate purposely didn’t react. A reaction would send her father into some lecture on “the guy who jilted you,” and Cate didn’t want to get into it, especially after last night.

      “He never did like to get his hair cut,” she said as she tossed the paper back to her father.

      “That’s all you got to say?”

      “No. I’m sorry he’s hurt.” She took a big bite of her cereal. The crunching muffled her father’s voice, but unfortunately, she could still make out what he was saying.

      “He ain’t just hurt. It says there that some girl named Allison might’a pushed him off one of them ski chairs.”

      “What does that have to do with me?”

      “Because of him, you’re thirty years old with no husband.”

      “I’m twenty-nine and I don’t want a husband. I’ve got a good life just the way it is.”

      “You ain’t got

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