Hey! I'm awake in the middle of the night… You shocked? I've an exam left (I'm not in the least bit worried about it), for which I've studied, and will continue to study for in the morning, afternoon, and evening. For now, here is the second part to the previous chapter.

While I'm HIGHLY disappointed with the lack of reviews for the last chapter, I couldn't sleep so I took a couple of hours to write this.

UNEDITED.

Chapter Eighteen

Waiting and Wanting

Sam shook her head and moved from her mother's arms; she got out of the bed and headed toward the door. Alexis was terrified of what she might do.

--- "Sam! Where are you going?"

The woman was hurt and angry all at once.

--- "Mom, I want to know what that son of a bitch has to say about all of this! God! He not only ruined your life, but he ruined mine!"

Alexis got up and grabbed her daughter by the arm.

--- "Uh, no you don't—"

Sam made a face.

--- "Are you kidding me right now? I have a right to know—"

Alexis put her hand up to interrupt her daughter.

--- "I know you do, but Sam, you're not going to get the information storming into the living room like some kind of Powerpuff Girl—"

--- "Powerpuff—"

Alexis rolled her eyes at her daughter.

--- "You know what I mean. I know that he totally screwed us—"

Sam rolled her eyes.

--- "No, Mom, he screwed you. He simply tossed me away."

The older woman sighed before leading her daughter back to the bed.

--- "Okay, you know what, he's still your father, and whatever may have happened between us when I got pregnant with you happened when we were kids. I think we can afford to give him the benefit of the doubt."

Sam got into the bed knowing that there was no arguing with her mother over the matter.

--- "You know what, I'm beginning to think that you might be this forgiving because you just want him to pump your gas."

Alexis' mouth fell open.

--- "Excuse me?"

Sam sneezed and coughed a few times before repeating what she had just said.

--- "Mom, I'm sure you're pretty tired of going to the self pump; you've paid your dues, you deserve full service. I'll accept that, but I hope that the attendant doesn't plan on filling your tank with subpar gas."

Alexis squeezed the bridge of her nose.

--- "I'm not even going to justify anything that you've just said. I'm going to leave it to the assumption that because you're sick, that you would ever think that I'd let some repairman I don't even know anymore, tinker with my parts, just because I might be in need of a tune-up."

Sam groaned in disgust.

--- "Seriously? I didn't need to know all of that, Mom!"

Alexis laughed.

--- "You're the one who started brining up the garage and gas station metaphors. Anyway, you're not going out there, and that's final."

Sam shook her head in annoyance.

--- "I swear, I don't know why the hell I let you treat me as though I'm some kid—"

--- "Because you're my kid. I don't care how old you are, Sam; I'm still the Mom. Now, you can either go to sleep, or wait for me to come back, and I'll tell you what I know."

--- "Well, can I have my cell back?"

Alexis looked around the room.

--- "Um, my purse is in the living room, but nothing is stopping you from calling that wall you call a boyfriend, on the house phone."

She leaned down and gave her daughter a kiss on the top of the head.

--- "I know you want to know what happened, but leave it to me, honey."

--- "And what are you going to do if you find out that he's back for his own self-serving interests?"

Alexis, as she walked her closet to hang up her suit jacket, thought her daughter's question over for a moment, before responding.

--- "Um, I guess they'll be nothing else to do but feed the dog his own bone."

Sam shook her head and laughed at her mother.

--- "Well, I guess you might want to get out there and see if the dog wants to go for a stroll down memory lane."

Alexis smiled at her daughter.

--- "I guess you're right."

She turned and walked out of the room toward the living room not knowing what to expect from this long awaited conversation with the man she believed dead for all of those years.

When she entered the living room, she found him staring at the family pictures throughout the room.

--- "I'm sorry to keep you waiting for so long."

He turned around and smiled at her.

--- "Well, I guess when you've waited twenty-nine years, a few minutes doesn't matter. How is Samantha?"

Alexis walked to the refreshment table and poured herself a glass of water.

--- "She's fine. What do you mean you've waited for twenty-nine years? You left me. You completely abandoned me, Mathieu."

She suddenly felt a surge of anger fill her as she thought about the repercussions of his actions on her life feeling guilty over giving up her child, and over the life that her eldest daughter had to endure because of his selfishness. She turned around to face him. He looked puzzled.

--- "Alexandra, I've never stopped loving you—"

She scoffed at his response.

--- "Are you kidding me, Mathieu? Are you seriously joking right now?"

He walked over to her and put the glass in her hand down on the table.

--- "Alexandra, I have been waiting for you for twenty-nine years—"

Alexis shook her head and smacked him across the face.

--- "At the expense of our daughter?!"

He held his face shocked that the woman hit him.

--- "I would NEVER hurt Samantha! I don't know why you're so angry; it's you who has kept her from me all of those years—"

Alexis was taken aback.

--- "ME?! How in the world did you come up with something like that?"

He nodded his head and pointed and accusatory finger at the woman. He never would think to disrespect a woman, but he was not feeling his blood boil.

--- "I wanted more than anything in the world to raise that child—"

Alexis rolled her eyes.

--- "Yea, so much so that you wrote a letter to my father telling him that you couldn't be bothered getting stuck being a young father; you had your family responsibilities to think about. You had your damned family expectations!"

He shook his head in confusion.

--- "I don't know what you're talking about—"

Alexis glared at him before walking out of the room toward her bedroom; Mathieu knew better than to follow her there. Alexis stormed into the room, much to Sam's shock.

--- "Mom, what's going on?"

She ignored her daughter and walked into her closet. Sam jumped out of the bed and followed.

--- "Mom—"

Alexis shook her head.

--- "Sam, I thought I told you to stay in bed?"

Sam frowned at her mother's dismissive attitude as she watched her pull a box from the top of her closet.

--- "Um, you're not going to kill him are you?"

Alexis shot her daughter a look before taking the box and walking toward her. She put her hand on her daughter's back and led her out of the closet and back into the bed.

--- "Sam, just talk to robo-man; I'll talk to you about this later."

Sam sighed and got back into the bed; she watched perplexingly as her mother walked out of the room.

Alexis returned to the living room with the box in her hands. She walked to the couch, sat down, and placed the box onto the coffee table.

--- "Open it."

Mathieu remained in his spot. She looked up at him with fury in her eyes. She wanted terribly to scream at the man, but she also did not want to wake up the whole house.

--- "I said open it."

He was shocked by the sound of her voice; it was an icy cold he had never before heard from the timid young girl he had once known. He nodded his head and walked to the coffee table. He took the box and opened it.

--- "What is this?"

She noticed the first item he picked out; it was the lock of hair she had been given after Sam was taken from her mere minutes after she was born.

--- "That's Sam's lock of hair."

He moved to the couch and sat down beside Alexis. He smiled as he held the soft piece of hair in his hands tied by a yellow ribbon.

--- "Why are you—"

She shook her head.

--- "There's more in the box, Mathieu."

He looked at her for a moment before replacing the hair in the box and taking out a yellowed envelope. He glanced at Alexis, knowing that the envelope was exactly what she had meant for him to see. He opened it and pulled out a letter and read it. After he was done, he covered his mouth in shock.

--- "I don't know what this is."

Alexis laughed mockingly.

--- "You don't know what that is? That is the letter you sent to my father—"

He shook his head in disbelief.

--- "This is what I'm telling you, Alexandra, I never sent a letter to your father! God, I thought your father was dead?"

She frowned at him.

--- "That doesn't matter. What are you talking about that you never sent a letter to Mikkos?"

He stared at the words written on the letter; it looked like the handwriting of his youth, but he certainly did not write such a letter.

--- "I didn't write this—"

--- "That's your handwriting, Mathieu! I recognized it!"

He put the letter back in the box and grabbed her hands.

--- "Alexandra, I would have never written a letter like that! I wanted to be with you! I wanted to raise our daughter together! Why would I have ever done something like that?"

She pulled her hands back.

--- "If you didn't write the letter, who did?"

He thought about it for a moment before looking at the woman standing in front of the fireplace with her arms crossed glaring at him.

--- "The same person who wrote the letter to me months prior telling me that I would be better off without you."

Alexis felt a tear roll down her face at the realization that once again, Helena had managed to find a way to ruin her life. Despite everything that she had ever done to her, this had to have been by far the worst.

--- "Helena? How? God, why do I even ask 'how;' there are a lot of things that she's done in the past that have been far more incomprehensible that this."

He stood up and paced the room.

--- "I know you told me not to, but I wrote a letter to you when we were on holiday—"

--- "During summer break?"

He nodded his head.

--- "Yes. Cherie, I could not help but write something to you and tell you how much I loved you—"

It all began to make sense to her.

--- "And that's how she found out about us? That's why she sent the letter to you about not being with me? Why didn't you tell me that that was the reason? I would've known then that she was watching us."

He walked up to her. He put his hand on her face; he felt the softness in her skin.

--- "I didn't want to worry you."

She closed her eyes to his touch; she was beginning to feel like that teenage girl she once was. And then she remembered her daughter waiting for her to tell her why it was that she was made to live a life as a con and thief for nineteen years of her life. Alexis pulled away.

--- "If you didn't write the letter, what happened to you? Why didn't you meet me? Why did you let Mikkos take me?"

She was now fighting the tears from escaping her eyes. Mathieu began walking about the room, before stopping in front of a picture of Sam and Alexis; he would not have known it, but the picture was ten years old, and taken after Sam had slept with Ric, and before Alexis was due to go into the hospital for surgery to remove a piece of her lung. He stared at the picture.

--- "You two look uncomfortable."

Alexis softened and walked up to him to look at the picture.

--- "That's because we were. We had just found out that we were mother and daughter—"

He nearly dropped the picture.

--- "What?"

Alexis frowned at him before repeating what she had just said.

--- "We had just found out that we were mother and daughter."

He placed the picture on console table. He rubbed his eyebrows together.

--- "You didn't raise her?"

Alexis took another piece of paper out of the box and handed it to him.

--- "Mathieu, when I got that letter from you… [ahem] or at least I thought it was from you, my father took me away from the school, had me tutored privately, and then made me give her up."

--- "She told me that things were weird for you in the beginning, but now you get a long fine. I didn't understand what she meant; I figured I would ask you about it. I had no idea—"

He read over the papers; they were a papers relinquishing Alexis of parental rights to the baby.

--- "But her name—"

She wiped her face from the tears that had fallen.

--- "Well, that was the only thing my father allowed. I begged him that if he was going to make me give her up, that I should be able to name my child. I told him that I was to be kept from her, that I should at least be able to know her name."

He too had tears rolling down his face.

--- "So you kept the name Samantha."

She shrugged her shoulders.

--- "Despite my hatred for you at the time, Mati, that child was borne from love. She had her name before she was born, and I wanted her to have it. Right now, there's nothing that can be done about all of that, I just want to know what happened to you."

Flashback

Mathieu was quickly moving about his dorm room packing his things when the headmaster walked in.

--- "Mr. LeGros, going someplace?"

Mathieu stopped what he was doing, shocked that he had been caught red-handed. He turned around to see not only his headmaster, but his parents and a man he did not recognize standing in the room.

--- "Maman? Papa?"

His father spoke to the headmaster.

--- "You may leave. Thank you."

Mathieu glanced at the clock on the wall; the time was approaching quickly for him to meet Alexis, and now it seemed as though the likelihood of such an encounter happening was slim.

--- "What—"

His mother quickly walked up to him and smacked him across the face, and began to scold him in French.

--- "I can't believe you got that girl pregnant!"

He was shocked that they had known; there was no sense in denying it.

--- "I'm going to marry her."

His father stepped up to him.

--- "The hell you will! You will have nothing to do with her."

The young man was shocked by his father's words.

--- "What do you mean? I love her! She's carrying my child!"

The man who had walked into the room with his parent spoke up.

--- "That maybe so, but she is a minor, Mathieu. You've raped her."

Mathieu was shocked; he screamed at the man.

--- "I would NEVER hurt Alexandra! I LOVE HER!"

The man flinched at the rage in the boy's voice.

--- "You are 18 now—"

--- "So what!"

--- "Alexis is 16. She is not old enough to consent to having sex with you. And if she's not old enough to have sex with you, young man, she's clearly not old enough to marry you."

Mathieu stared at the man.

--- "What are you saying?"

Mathieu's parents stared at the young man in disappointment and disapproval. The man cleared his throat.

--- "You have two choices. You can go to jail for rape—"

Had his father not caught him, Mathieu would have attacked the man.

--- "I already told you that I did not rape her! Alexandra is my girlfriend! I love her!"

The man shook his head.

--- "Your second option is to leave with your parents now, and never return."

Mathieu began to cry. He felt like a fool for doing so, but his heart hurt at the thought of losing Alexis and his child.

--- "And what about Alexandra? What about my baby?"

The man sighed.

--- "She will raise the child. She will send you updates."

Mathieu wanted to punch a wall.

--- "That's it? Updates?"

--- "And pictures—"

--- "I don't want pictures and updates—"

Mathieu's father stepped forward.

--- "You don't have a choice. We're leaving. Mr. Cassadine, you may leave."

Mikkos nodded his head and left leaving Mathieu with his family. He now had to deal with his own family.

End of Flashback.

Alexis shook her head.

--- "That bastard. He told me that you died a few years after I gave Sam up!"

Mathieu stared at the paper in his hand.

--- "I thought all this time that you had raised our daughter and that you've kept her from me."

Alexis wiped her eyes.

--- "And yet you never tried to look for me?"

He looked at her.

--- "I did! For a long time, I did! And then I realized that it would not be fair to Samantha if I interfered with her life. I figured that you had your own lives. I didn't want to disrupt it. I thought that you didn't want me in your life, and I wanted to respect your decision. I hated it, and I was angry… I am angry, but I suppose now it's pointless."

She nodded her head.

--- "You're right; it looks like the Cassadines struck again. I can't believe this."

He walked up to her. He took her face into his hands and wiped her tears away with his thumbs.

--- "No matter how angry I was with you Alexandra, I never stopped loving you; I can't say this enough. I love you. I love Samantha. I want you both."

He kissed passionately; she kissed him back. Afterwards, he pressed his forehead to hers.

--- "I don't know what's going on with you and Big Mac—"

She laughed through her tears, as her heart was filled with conflicted emotions.

--- "I don't know why you keep calling him Big Mac, but Mati, it's a bit weird."

He kissed her again.

--- "Alexandra, I will fight for you. I will fight for the love we once had."

She pulled away from him.

--- "I don't know."

He did not want to push her into realizing that they were meant to be. He had no problems working toward reclaiming her heart.

--- "It's okay."

He looked at his watch; it was two o'clock in the morning.

--- "I should probably go."

Alexis nodded her head.

--- "I'm sorry, Mati."

He passed his hand along her cheek again.

--- "There is nothing to be sorry for, Cherie."

He put his coat on and walked toward the door before making a realization.

--- "I don't have a car."

Alexis smacked herself in the forehead.

--- "I completely forgot. Um, I'll drive you—"

He shook his head.

--- "No. It's late, and I'm sure you're tired. I'll take a taxi—"

She laughed at him.

--- "Mati, its 2 a.m. in upstate New York. There are no cabs running at this time. If you insist that I not drive you; I insist that you stay."

His heart leapt… in his pants… although he knew that he would undoubtedly be spending the night on her couch.

--- "I don't want to impose."

Alexis shook her head.

--- "You know what, I think it's a good thing. Our daughter is sick; she might need a doctor."

He smiled at the sound of her calling Sam their daughter.

--- "Okay. I'll stay."

--- "Good. I'll be right back."

She went into her room to find Sam sound asleep. She went into her closet and grabbed an extra pillow and blanket and carried them back into the living room.

--- "Here you go."

He smiled at another picture of Sam and Alexis; this one appeared more recent. Alexis stood behind him.

--- "That was from this non-wedding we went to a few days ago."

He traced his daughter's face with his finger.

--- "We made a beautiful child together."

She nodded her head in agreement as she handed him the pillow and blanket.

--- "Yes we did."

--- "Merci Cherie."

He kissed her on both cheeks.

--- "You're welcome Mati. Well, good night."

--- "Good night, mon amour."

He watched her as she walked out of the room. He put the pillow and blanket on the couch and looked at the lock of hair in the box; he was determined to have what was stolen from him.

Alexis walked back into her bedroom emotionally drained by the information that had just been revealed. She cursed her father's name as she stood at the door staring at her sleeping daughter, while thinking of the man making himself comfortable on her couch. She could not believe the life that was stolen from her, and the life that was forced upon her beautiful child. She walked into her closet, and changed into her pajamas before getting into bed.

She crawled into bed, hopeful not to wake her daughter. She felt her forehead; she was still warm.

--- "Oh honey, I wish you would stop doing crazy things like skinny dipping in the winter."

Sam opened her eyes and looked at her mother; it was evident that she had been crying.

--- "I guess he wanted me after all."

Alexis was shocked. She had no idea that Sam had been eavesdropping. She snuggled close with her daughter, passing her hand through her hair.

--- "You were always wanted."

Sam turned into her mother.

--- "Where is he?"

Alexis looked at her.

--- "Asleep on the couch."

Sam smiled and laughed. She began to laugh harder. Alexis was confused.

--- "What's the matter, crazy?"

Sam laid grabbed her pillow and balled it up underneath her head and smiled at her mother.

--- "Well, you're going to have a lot of explaining to do in the morning."

She rolled over and fell right asleep.

Alexis took her pillow and muffled a scream. She looked at her daughter for a few minutes, amazed at the chain of events that lead them to where they were that day. She sat up and gave her a hard swat on the behind causing her to jump up from her sleep. She rubbed her stung bottom.

--- "What the hell, Mom!"

Alexis pointed a finger at her daughter.

--- "I told you that you were due for a spanking! That's for the hell you've put me through all day and for the hell I'm clearly going to go through in the morning!"

Sam rolled her eyes, smacked her mother with her pillow, and rolled back over.

--- "I swear Mom, if there's a bruise tomorrow morning, I'm totally calling Department of Children and Family Services on you!"

Alexis laughed and kissed her daughter on the back of the head before turning out her lamp.

--- "Whatever. I love you, honey."

Sam rolled back over and wrapped her arms around her mother.

--- "I love you, too, Mom. Thanks for wanting me."

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Now, will you PLEASE review?

JaSammers, your wish is my command… I had an epiphany. Review and you shall be rewarded in the next chapter.