Just getting to see her was a victory. Catching a glimpse of her through the window to their bedroom, or hearing her voice when he put Belle inside after their walk. He wanted her back. There was no getting around that now. He'd taken to staying at the office as late as possible, trying to give Bette and Roger the time alone without having to admit that he needed to find an apartment.
Gregory didn't want an apartment. He wanted to go home. The nagging idea of her being alone in the house plagued him. He sat on the beach and watched the lights of her car bring her home from work. He waited in the mornings, hoping to see her leaving the house on the way to the office. Actually seeing her at the office was too much. Olivia couldn't meet his eyes, she'd look away, or even worse, pretend she didn't see him at all.
Bette was reaching the breaking point. He'd come home quietly one evening and caught the end of an argument raging through the penthouse.
"What do you expect them to do? Just jump back into their marriage like nothing has happened?" Roger baited as he slammed something down hard on the table.
"It's not as if we're talking about Cinderella and Prince Charming here-" Bette's skirt swished and he pictured her pacing in front of the table. "Livie and Greggie have fought like cats and dogs since they met. What's different now?"
"She doesn't trust him." Roger began with a sigh. "Olivia realized she could lose him,"
"That's it isn't it?" Bette sank into the couch with a hiss of epiphany. "Livie never saw him as human before. She worshipped him, he was infallible."
The clink of glass and the splash of liquid. "He's Gregory bloody Richards. He was most likely to succeed when we were in grammar school together."
Gregory smiled softly to himself. 'Gregory bloody Richards' indeed.
"He could have anything." Bette acknowledged. "God, he nearly does, it's just that now, now he wants her-"
"And she doesn't know what to do."
"Not that I blame her. He knocked her up and tried to get himself killed. What's he going to do for an encore? Run for president and declare war on France?"
"Invade Russia in winter." Roger equipped playfully as Gregory heard the rustling of fabric between them. "He never could hold on to Russia when we played Risk together."
"No on can-" Bette stopped and kissed his cheek to shut him up. "I'm not arguing board games with you."
Roger left the couch to fetch the wine from the table. "You were arguing Richardses with me."
"Maybe I don't want to fight."
"Well now-" The voices stopped for a moment. "That's something else entirely..."
Gregory could picture the satisfied look on Roger's face and decided that discretion was the better part of friendship. At least for the moment. He could find something to do at Liberty. It was late enough that Olivia would be home. More than anything else he longed to go home. To hear her in the other room and know everything was right with the world when he went to bed beside her.
She was the only one he slept next to. He remembered affairs, the mixture of lust and loneliness that drove him other women. Younger women, powerful women, unattainable women. Anyone who wouldn't ask for his love. Was it so strange that now she had it? Sean said it had taken him years to believe his parents loved each other at all. When he knew who she was he couldn't let himself love her, and now it was all he could do not storm into his living room and demand she take him back.
Drag every last story out of her until he knew what had happened. Why having another child had meant so much to him and what had happened with Caitlin? Who was Caitlin?
Olivia couldn't handle having a funeral for her. Sean was out of the country. Gregory had picked up her ashes at the Argentinean embassy. She was a beautiful woman in the photograph he kept in his wallet. Young and terribly beautiful, too gentle to do what Sean said she had done. Too young to put her mother in harm's way.
The office was blissfully empty. Even so, Gregory couldn't help stopping in front of her door. His old office. Sometimes he was tempted to sign it all away. Leave Liberty in her capable hands and retire to just being a lawyer. Hell, give it all up and just be a father. Would he be a good father? He couldn't help wondering if father's were supposed to remember everything perfectly.
Not that would be a problem for the baby. He remembered every moment since he woke up in the hospital with perfect clarity. This baby would have the best life he could give it, no matter what he had to do. He'd already proven that. He'd let his daughter nearly destroy him to protect Olivia and the baby. The baby- their baby- he deserved a father. A father who knew why he loved his mother.
Switching on just the lamp over the desk, Gregory settled into his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. This office had been his home longer than his house it seemed. In his old life, he lived here, thrived on the stress of corporate life because he couldn't find himself at home. Now all he wanted was to go home. To open the door and see Olivia smile at him.
Gregory allowed himself the fantasy of kissing her cheek and pulling her into his arms. He had until the baby came to earn his way back. That was his deadline and he seemed like the kind of man who lived by deadlines. He could do it.
The knock on his office door surprised him out of dreams of Olivia's perfume rubbing off as he caressed her neck.
"Hey, didn't want to startle you, I was just going to leave this on your desk." Casey shrugged and held up a box. "Guess it's not much fun to go home when you can't."
Gregory grinned wryly and gestured to the desk. "Sometimes a good startling is good for me." He turned in his chair to get a better look at the younger man and the large cardboard box in his hands. "Just what are you leaving on my desk?"
Approaching tentatively, Casey held out the carton as a talisman. "I found them when I was going through my mother's things. She was obsessed with traveling light, but somehow she still kept a stash of stuff in a storage locker. Tons of it. I thought- with what happened- you might want these."
Their fingers touched for a moment as Casey handed over mysterious box. Gregory couldn't remember the last time he had touched anyone. "What are they?" Opening the lid, he looked down at the first envelope and recognized the handwriting as his own.
"They're yours, sort of." Casey thrust his empty hands into his pockets. "You wrote them to my mother. There's years of them, she saved them all."
"That's amazing." He remembered Alex's smile as one of the brightest points of his life. In the fog of his memories, Alex Mitchum glowed. "Are you sure you want to give them away?"
"I couldn't read them-" Casey started to blush as he fidgeted with his hands. "I mean, I started too, I read the first one, but-" You wrote them, and you should have them."
Reverently lifting the first letter, Gregory tried to place the smell of old paper and spices. From the postmark this letter had gone to India at one point. He wondered if it had been lovingly tucked into Alex's backpack as she wandered the far east. "Don't worry about it." He looked at the date and tried to remember what was happening in his life at that time. He couldn't place it.
The first line of his letter gave it away, "I'm going to owe you that bottle of wine after all. I've met the most beautiful creature I've ever seen, and she won't even speak to me." Olivia, when their relationship was new, barely more than an exchange of a few scattered words. Gregory kept reading, unable to tear himself away from the hopes of himself as a young man.
"Well, I'll be off then." Casey turned to go, ready to leave without so much as thanks.
Gregory set the letter comfortably on the desk and circled it slightly. Stopping at a safe distance by the corner, he wracked his brain. "I still have your mother's replies. If you'd like to read them."
He knew what that kind of brightness meant in the eyes of a young man. Gregory saved Casey the trouble of speaking. "They're at the house. in my study. There's a carton above the bookshelf, all it has to mark it is a sticker she sent me from Kiribati's one airport."
"I'll find it." Casey promised softly. He swallowed something painful and made himself smile. "She'd be the first one to tell you you'll get it all back."
Gregory picked up his old letter again, smiling as the feeling of the paper promised to shine some light on the corners of his mind. "Thank you. For everything. Especially the way you keep an eye on Olivia. I know we both appreciate it."
Casey ran a hand through his short blonde hair and tried to look nonchalant. "It's nice to have someone to look after."
"It is, isn't it?" Gregory wondered as he dove back into his letter. Someone to care for. A reason to smile in the morning. He missed that.
Her name is Olivia Blake. She's an acquaintance of that sister of Del's, the one who's on her third husband already. By the looks of it, this marriage might not make it either. I should be able to convince Del to introduce us, provided he doesn't think he should have the rights to her. I think she's the type of woman who, as you so delicately put it, wants to live in a greenhouse and be showered with affection. I know I'm terrible with plants, but for her, Alex, for her I'd make an exception.
"One child from each household, from each generation, belongs to the greater family. This child has responsibilities outside of their immediate family, sometimes they are small." Don Tribuno Ricciardi settled back into his velvet chair as if it were a throne. "Sometimes they can be very great." He gestured around his study with a monarch's reflective smile.
"As are the rewards." Sean offered as he stared down at his brandy. He'd never drank it before. It was leaving a heat in his stomach he was entirely unused to. The wealth of the Ricciardi house hadn't been lost on him. Even his guest room was gloriously furnished in the kinds of things he had learned to associate with power as he grow up in Sunset Beach's leading family. "It's not me, is it?"
Tribuno's perfect white teeth gleamed in the weak light of his study. "No son, it's not you. Your father told me you want to be a doctor."
"I want to save lives.' Sean finished his brandy quickly, realizing the burning in his throat did calm the guilt threatening to overrun his defenses. "I let you kill my sister."
"You took revenge. It was your right." Tribuno refilled Sean's glass, but betrayed nothing in his face.
"I took her life." Sean stared morosely down at the rich amber liquid. "I can't do that again."
The velvet and ebony chair creaked as Tribuno left it in favor of an ancient book lying open on a silk drapery tossed meticulously over the stand. "You won't be asked too." He turned a few pages and stopped on the most recent page of the family line. "Your place has been left up to you. As long as you take care of your family, we will have no reason to ask more of you."
"But you said-" Sean took his glass with him as he glanced down at the ancient pages of names.
"One child in a generation. One child of each house." Tribuno nodded in respect to name of his father. "My father, Tiziano, his bother, Nicolo-" He paused and corrected himself with a trace of sadness. "Nicholas. He tried to keep Gregorio from his family. Keep his son away from the only people who could protect him. The only people who could make sure he had the proper respect."
"My father serves the family." Sean continued as he followed Tribuno's finger on the page. His father's name was inscribed neatly. Gregory Alan Richards. His mother's was beside it. The names to the right were painfully too familiar. Caitlin Richards. His hand shook as he finished his brandy again. "But if I'm not required too, and my sister is-"
Tribuno tapped the empty page just beneath Sean's name. "You are not the end of your family line. Your brother-"
"He's not even born yet." Arguing with this king, in the heart of his castle, was definitely not somehting he should be doing. Sean couldn't help himself. "He's not even due until March."
The heavy hand on his shoulder was oddly comforting. There was a softness in this man's eyes that Sean never saw in his father. What had Nicholas taken away from his father? Where was this kindness? "We all have certain responsibilities we are born too. And some we assume as we grow. Your brother will lead an extraordinary life. He will see and do great things."
"He'll be a killer." Sean shuddered and tried to pull away, but the stranger pulled him into a hug. The kind of hug his father couldn't give him when he was growing up.
"What is greater than protecting those we love?" Tribuno whispered over the storm in Sean's heart. "What life could be more rewarding than that?"