Author's Note: To all who have reviewed previous chapters and waited patiently for this one -- Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope this chapter, which is unusually long, will have been worth the wait.

Should Have Been Me – Chapter 10

So, how tall are you exactly?" Sydney queried, trying to stall before leaving the building. She didn't want to run into Gage on the way to lunch.

"Exactly? I measure seventy-seven and one quarter inches barefoot. That's three-fourths of an inch under the maximum height restriction for state troopers."

"And they gave you the world's smallest office because…?"

"Just the luck of the draw. These quarters are temporary. When our new building is finished in a few weeks, I'll get a lot more elbow room."

Montoya had returned to his office to retrieve his suit jacket. Sydney waited at the doorway while he lifted the light gray coat off the back of his chair and put it on. He also wore matching slacks and a black shirt with a thin tone-on-tone pinstripe and no tie. His open collar offered Sydney a peek at his powerfully built chest, which matched his impossibly broad shoulders. Not that she noticed. Really.

"Shall we go? I think it's probably safe to leave now. I heard the Jeep drive away a minute ago." He gave her a knowing look.

Sydney tried to appear shocked, or at least confused. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Save it, Sydney. I'm not blind. Or stupid. Greatly disappointed maybe, but not stupid," he shot back, slightly irritated.

It was no use pretending. Miguel wasn't fooled. How had he guessed so much in so little time? If he had seen through her, then how much had Gage figured out?

"Oh, lord, am I really that obvious?" she groaned.

"Apparently not to him, but I've got a pretty good view of the situation, even from way up here," he joked, alluding to the vast difference in their heights.

"All kidding aside," he continued in a more serious tone, "the little game you're playing isn't very wise. Fortunately, I have an abundance of self-confidence, so my ego isn't bruised enough to want to do anything nasty. The next guy you try this with may not be such a paragon of virtue."

Sydney cringed at the thought. Clearly, her initial assessment had been correct; she stank at mind games.

"There won't be a 'next guy'," she admitted glumly.

Miguel crooked his index finger under her chin and tilted her face up to meet his eyes.

"Game or no game, if I thought I stood even the slightest chance of winning your heart, Sydney, I'd kiss you right now and do my damnedest to make you forget him. But I can see I'd be wasting my time. Your heart isn't yours to give away anymore. Your partner has already claimed the prize. It's too bad he can't appreciate it yet," he told her.

"Yet?" she squeaked. She couldn't help feeling a tad disappointed that Miguel was giving up so easily. Part of her would have liked to know what it felt like to kiss this mountain of a man.

"I don't know what made him run away from you today, but whatever it is, it's still stronger than what he feels for you. That won't always be the case. I hope for your sake that one day soon he will realize that true love is more than strong enough to slay his demons."

She looked up at him through narrowed eyes. "You say that like you've been there and done that."

"I'll tell you all about it over lunch."

-----

True to his word, at a quiet table in Manny's Mexican Cocina, Miguel told Sydney the story of how he met his late wife, Belinda, at a time when the last thing either of them wanted was to fall in love.

"I had just been discharged from the army after Desert Storm. I was a mess, but I didn't know it," he started.

Their waitress delivered two steaming plates of fajitas with all the trimmings to the table. The meat and vegetables were sizzling so loud that Miguel had to wait a minute before continuing to speak. As the conversation resumed, they both dug in to their meals.

"So, you were a mess…" Sydney repeated. She moved her fork forward in a circular motion, indicating, Go on.

"Yes, I was, but I had no idea how affected I had really been by all the horrific stuff I'd seen over there. I lived alone. I had no close family or friends other than my army buddies and an occasional casual girlfriend. No, I take that back. They weren't girlfriends; they were sex partners. I didn't feel anything for any of them. In fact, I didn't feel anything at all. Period.

"While I waited for a spot to open up at the State Police Academy, I had a job installing security systems in office buildings. I'd get up, go to work, go out for a few drinks after work, maybe pick up some woman who wanted to see if all my body parts were proportional, take her home and, most of the time, wake up the next morning alone and hung over. I lived like that for about a year before I met Belinda."

Sydney watched Miguel's features soften when he spoke her name. It was clear that he had loved her dearly.

"Let me guess," Sydney broke in, "She wasn't interested in proportional body parts."

"Oh, yes, she was, just not the same one as all the other women. Belinda wanted my heart to be as big as the rest of me."

"How did you meet her?"

"I installed a new security system in a school for handicapped children in Pottsboro. Belinda was one of the teachers. While I was in her classroom, running wires and installing a keypad on the wall, I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was the prettiest woman I had ever seen."

"What did she look like?" Sydney was fully absorbed in the story now. She wanted all the details.

"You, actually," Miguel said matter-of-factly as he sipped his iced tea.

Sydney nearly choked on a bite of tortilla. "Me?"

"Yes, you could almost be sisters. She had long, straight, dark hair and deep, brown eyes. Your faces are very similar, too, but there is one important difference. She was nearly six feet tall," he revealed, smiling at the memory.

Now his initial reaction to her made more sense. It didn't really have as much to do with Sydney herself as it did with her resemblance to his beloved, deceased wife. The truth stung just a little. She should have known he could never be attracted to her for herself. She didn't even wear makeup.

"Love at first sight?" Sydney guessed, revealing nothing of her wounded ego. She was still trying to picture a much taller version of herself.

"On the contrary, I had only one interest in women at that point in my life. When I asked her if she wanted to go out for a drink after school, she informed me that she didn't drink and even if she did, she wouldn't go out with an unfeeling jerk like me. Naturally, I was offended."

"Because she called you an unfeeling jerk."

"No, because she turned me down. I didn't care about being an unfeeling jerk, but since that was the reason she gave for not going out with me, I asked her how she knew that about me. She said it was because I had spent all that time in her classroom and never once paid any attention to the children. She was right. I hadn't given them a second thought. What kind of heartless bastard spends three hours in a room full of children in wheelchairs, or with missing limbs, or who are bald from chemo treatments, and shows not the slightest interest, not one whit of compassion?"

"Someone who had shut off his feelings so that he could deal with the day to day horrors of war. It's a coping mechanism, Miguel, not a character flaw."

"Sure, I know that now, but back when I was trying to get to first base with the girl of my dreams, I was clueless." He chuckled, his black eyes twinkling.

"So how did you get her to go out with you?"

"I promised to take every one of her students – all twelve of them - out for ice cream the next day if she would agree to go to dinner with me afterward."

"How did that go?"

"Fearing a logistical nightmare, I approached the event like a military operation and it went off without a hitch. She told me later it worked so well because I provided the structure and she kept it fun and familiar. And it was fun. It was the first time I had laughed in a long time."

"So, she finds out you're not heartless and then what? She falls head-over-heels in love?"

"Nope, but I sure did. I tried everything to get her to go out with me a second time, but she wouldn't budge. She kept saying there was no future in it, but I didn't care. I just wanted to be with her as much as possible. For the next thirty-five days, I brought her coffee every morning at the school before the kids arrived. She would never let me touch her, but we would talk and gradually I was able to turn my feelings back on, not just for her, but also about what I had been through in the service.

"On day thirty-six, when I got there I found her sitting in her car, crying. I couldn't help myself; I broke the touching rule. I knelt down and hugged her and she cried harder. I kept asking what was wrong, but she wouldn't tell me. She said she couldn't see me anymore. When I asked her why, she said, "Because I love you." I was ecstatic, but very confused," Miguel recalled. His eyes were misty.

Sydney wasn't sure she wanted to hear the rest of the story. She didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Belinda was trying to protect Miguel from some awful truth about her. But nothing in Miguel's demeanor suggested he was sad or bitter about anything; maybe the ending was happier than she thought.

"What was wrong with her?" Sydney ventured, despite her sudden recollection of her grandfather warning her not to ask questions if she didn't really want the answers.

"She was dying."

"Oh, Miguel, I'm so sorry." Not knowing what else to do, Sydney reached out and touched Miguel's hand. He clasped her fingers in his. It reminded her of how Gage had held her hand when he told her about his sister moving out of their foster home. Had that been just this morning? She'd lost all sense of time listening to Miguel's story.

"She had leukemia. It had been in remission for years, but her doctors had just told her it was back. I was furious."

"With her?" Sydney balked, letting go of his hand. She felt a need to defend this woman she'd never met. "She was trying to pro-"

Miguel held up his hand and smiled. "Whoa, there, little lady. I wasn't angry with her. I was angry at everything else – bad timing, cosmic karma, God, even myself. I had let myself feel again, and for what? Just to lose her to some insidious disease? She saw what was happening, what I was thinking. That was when she told me she wasn't crying for herself; she was crying for me."

Sydney's puzzled look brought another knowing smile from him.

"She said she had accepted her own mortality long ago, but she was afraid that I would shut down again, close myself off from my feelings to avoid the pain of losing her. I said the first thing that came into my head. I asked her to marry me."

"What did she say?"

"At first, she turned me down flat. Vehemently. But then I told her that the only way I was going to be able to keep my heart alive from that moment on was by waking up next to her every day. If she really didn't want me to retreat into the darkness again, she had to agree to be my light. And she did. We were married three weeks later."

As if on cue, the waitress laid the check for lunch on the table and chirped, "Can I get you anything else?"

"No, thank you," Miguel replied. He looked across the table and saw that Sydney had tears in her eyes.

"No reason to be sad, Sydney. We had almost six years together. We spent our honeymoon in the Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York where she underwent some aggressive chemo and an experimental drug therapy that sent the leukemia into remission again. She went back to teaching and I became a state trooper. We were ridiculously happy."

"Until…"

"She died. Two years ago, last December. She was mad because the Cowboys were winning that year and she wanted to see them go all the way. Made me promise to go to every home game and cheer them on for her."

As they stood to leave, Sydney marveled at how easily he seemed to be coping with what must have been a devastating loss. Her eyes glowed with admiration for him.

He noticed her expression on their walk back to his office.

"Oh, now, don't go nominating me for sainthood. To say that I handled her death poorly is the understatement of the decade. The bender I went on after her funeral was nothing short of legendary. My fellow troopers left me alone for a week, during which I drank an ocean of whiskey and never turned on the lights in my house. She was my light and she was gone. I wanted so badly to crawl into the dark and never come out."

"What turned you around? You certainly appear to have made it through all the stages of grief."

"I have, but it wasn't easy and it took a long time. I've only recently gotten to acceptance. My coworkers dragged me out of my house, literally kicking and screaming, and back to work and into therapy. Not one of my finer moments. Her students were a big influence, too. I spent a lot of time with them and we grieved together. I mean it's damned hard to wallow in self-pity around kids who have no legs, or who are in the last stages of bone cancer, and who are joking with each other all the while about how goofy they all look."

As they reached the DPS building, Miguel opened the door for her. They walked past the reception desk and back to his office, where he shed his jacket and checked the fax machine. He removed a thick stack of papers from the machine's output tray.

"Looks like we have our work cut out for us. We could be here for several more hours. Are you sure you want to stay and do all this?" he asked.

"Right now, this is my priority. We have a witness set to testify against Ronson. If he did have Slater killed, then he's got a longer reach than we thought and our witness would be next on his hit list. For her sake, we have to know one way or the other," she explained, adding, "Besides, I want to hear the rest of your story."

"There isn't anything left to tell. Except maybe that I'd do it all again."

"Really? Even knowing how it would end, you'd still let yourself fall in love with her?"

"Absolutely, because if I learned anything from Belinda, it was that we can't hide from pain without also hiding from love. I wouldn't trade loving her and being loved by her for anything, even though the price for it was more pain than I ever thought a human being could endure. But we did endure, and it was love that saw us through. Oh, I know her body succumbed to the disease, but her spirit never did. The truth is, if we had chosen to separate because of her disease, she still would have died, but neither of us would have ever really lived."

"You are a remarkable human being, Sergeant Miguel Montoya," Sydney beamed.

"There you go putting me on a pedestal again. Hell, woman, I'm liable to get a nosebleed from the altitude!" he joked.

Sydney laughed out loud at the mental picture she had of him perched atop the first pedestal that came to mind – the one under the Statue of Liberty. He must have had the same thought, because a second later, he stood on his chair in that famous statue's pose, one hand clutching the pile of fax papers and the other lifting a pencil skyward. He had to hunch his shoulders to keep from hitting his head on the ceiling. Sydney doubled over laughing.

"Give me your tired, your poor…" he intoned before breaking into hysterics himself.

The civilian aide appeared in the doorway, her hands on her hips.

"If y'all are having a party in here, how come I wasn't invited?" she drawled.

Miguel climbed down off the chair. After a couple of deep breaths, he and Sydney managed to reduce their guffaws to a few minor giggles.

"I'm sorry, Jeannine, we didn't mean to disturb anyone. We'll hold it down from now on," Miguel promised.

"Laugh all you want, just include me in the joke next time, OK?" Her expression said she'd like Miguel to include her in a lot more than office humor.

The phone rang at the reception desk. Before Jeannine went to answer it, she gave Sydney a look that fell somewhere between haughty disapproval and open hostility.

"Is she like that with everybody?" Sydney asked after Jeannine returned to her desk.

"I've done everything short of filing a sexual harassment complaint to try to discourage her. What can I say? I guess I'm just irresistible." He flashed that perfect white smile again.

"And modest, too." Sydney smiled back.

"Right. If you're sure you want to stay, we can work in the conference room," Miguel suggested.

"I get the feeling you spend a lot of time in here," Sydney replied as they entered the room and sat at the long, black table.

"Two weeks, they assure me, until the new building will be ready. It can't happen soon enough for me. Which do you want, Dallas County or Grayson?"

"I'll take Dallas and check the outgoing calls first," Sydney answered.

Miguel sifted through the reports, found what she needed and handed it to her. Then he chose a stack for himself and they both began combing the lists for anything that might link Ronson to Slater's killer.

Thirty minutes later, Miguel's cell phone rang.

"Montoya." After a beat or two, he continued, "Mr. Thornton, what have you got for me?" Another pause. "How sure are you he's telling the truth?"

Sydney listened as Miguel asked a few more questions and then wrapped up the conversation with, "Thank you, Mr. Thornton, if we need anything else we'll be in touch."

"So, what did he say?" Sydney asked.

"Slater's death was an accident, a fairly weird accident, but still definitely not intentional," Miguel answered.

"Weird how?" Sydney looked at him expectantly.

"One of the inmates working in the kitchen finally admitted he was the one who used the wrong oil to refill the fryers. Apparently, he can't read. The jugs for the vegetable oil and the peanut oil are stored on the same shelf. He grabbed the wrong ones and no one caught the mistake. Thornton said the man is fairly religious and his conscience got the better of him once word about what killed Slater got around."

"I can see the autopsy report now. 'Cause of death: illiteracy'. Somebody should make a commercial," Sydney said humorlessly.

"Well, I guess that means we can stop beating our heads against this wall, huh?" Miguel announced, holding up his stack of papers.

"Yep. I need to call Gage and let him know it won't be necessary to stash our witness in the safe house after all. He'll be thrilled."

"I imagine the witness will be happy, too."

"You have no idea," Sydney quipped.

Two hours later, Miguel pulled up in front of Sydney's house in Dallas. They had spent the drive discussing everything from the sad state of the Texas educational system to their favorite sports teams.

"Do you want to come in?" Sydney offered.

"I'd better not. My cat gets testy if I'm late with her tuna. She still has claws and my furniture has the scratches to prove it," Miguel replied.

"I spent the whole day with you and you never once mentioned you had a cat. Or did you just invent her to have a reason not to stick around?"

"Why, Sydney! I'm shocked that you would think me capable of such subterfuge," Miguel announced in mock horror.

"So, how long have you had this cat?" She leveled a steely glare at him, couldn't maintain the attitude and finally cracked a grin.

He reached over and gently took her hand. "Actually, I adopted her about twenty miles back when I realized I might need a way to beat a hasty retreat without… complicating matters."

He could see by the look on her face that she wasn't going to let him get away with that for an excuse. He let out a long sigh.

"OK, the truth is, I'd love to come in, but it's been a long dry spell, Sydney, and I am way too attracted to you. Not to mention, you have too many unresolved feelings for your partner. It's better for both of us if we just say good-bye right here."

He was right, of course. Damn it.

"So, I'll just leave you with this – " He handed her one of his business cards. She took it and started to say something, but he put a finger to her lips.

"And this," he added and leaned across the seat to place his lips where his finger had just been.

The kiss was light and tender and, Sydney mused, a little sad. It lasted just long enough to make her wish it had lasted longer. Unbidden, one of those questions she probably shouldn't ask came to mind.

"Miguel?"

"Yes."

"Who were you kissing just now?"

He had started to trace her jaw with his fingers, but stopped abruptly and sat upright on his side of the seat. For a heartbeat, his black eyes flashed with some dark emotion, but then it was gone.

"I guess I understand why you might wonder about that, but you needn't have. My wife is dead. I could meet her identical twin tomorrow and I would still know every minute of every day that she wasn't Belinda. I meant what I said before, Sydney. If Gage wasn't in the picture, you'd have a hard time getting rid of me, and not because you look a little like her, but because you are a beautiful, desirable woman in your own right."

Sydney looked away, caught a glimpse of herself in the passenger side mirror. Beautiful? Desirable? Me?

"You don't believe that about yourself, do you?" Miguel observed. He crooked his finger under her chin again and gently turned her to face him. "Just because Gage hasn't acknowledged his feelings for you yet, doesn't mean you aren't everything any sane man would want. I hope for your sake that he realizes what he's missing and does something about it, but even if he never comes around, don't ever think it's because there's anything wrong with you. I'm here to tell you, he's the one with the problem."

"Thank you, Miguel. You are a very special man. Would it be too much to ask for us to be friends?"

"Yes. But if our paths ever cross again at work, I wouldn't complain," he replied with a wistful smile.

Sydney started to open her door, but stopped when Miguel laid his hand on her shoulder. For a split second, she hoped he had changed his mind about staying, but she pushed the thought away when he told her to let him get the door for her.

He got out, walked around the front of the car and opened her door. She stepped out and he closed the door. They stood together on the sidewalk in the dark for a minute before either of them could speak.

"Goodnight, Miguel. It has truly been a pleasure meeting you," Sydney finally managed.

"Goodbye, Sydney. Be happy." He kissed her lightly on the forehead and then turned quickly to walk back around the car and get in, folding his long frame into the driver's seat. He waited until she had gone inside before he started the engine and slowly pulled away.

Standing in her living room in the dark, remembering Miguel's words, his kiss, Sydney felt something shift inside her. Her old image of herself was changing, growing right then and there into something new. She was more now than the short, plain girl who constantly had to fight to be accepted in a man's world. She was a woman, beautiful and desirable.

What had Miguel said? 'Everything any sane man would want.' The desire she had seen shining in Miguel's eyes was real, and it was for her. For her.

She walked down the hallway and into her bedroom. She turned on the light and looked into the dresser mirror. She almost didn't recognize the woman staring back at her.

"Look out, Gage," she warned. "There's a new Sydney in town."