Page 98 of Forgotten Promise

No wonder he’d looked so…devastated.

Kailani had thought her heart had already broken yesterday, when she woke up and realized both Benjamin and John were gone.

Now…

“God, Benjamin,” she said, stepping toward him, placing her hands on his waist, desperate to keep him from walking away again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t ask Selene to dissolve the trinity because that isn’t what I want.”

He stared at her for just a moment, and she could practically see the wheels spinning in his brain as he tried to decide whether or not to believe her. “You don’t want the trinity broken?”

She shook her head. “No. That’s why I’m here. I want this, want you and John, but I’m so afraid…” Kailani blinked rapidly, hating the tears suddenly blurring her vision. She wasn’t going to cry, wasn’t going to use tears, when she asked for his forgiveness.

She took a steadying breath, then forged on. “This is what I mean. We’re both too hot-headed, too impatient. We shut down at the first sign of adversity. I let you leave after Paris without telling you how I felt. I lost my shit in Boston, reacting rather than thinking, and then…I left. Without talking to you. When Selene dissolved the trinity, I didn’t speak up because I was afraid you didn’t want me.”

“And instead of sticking around, telling you what I thought, I left. Fuck, Kailani. I’m sorry I didn’t stay.”

“I don’t want to do this anymore. Don’t want to keep hurting you.”

Benjamin cupped her cheek with one hand, tilting her face up, his thumb stroking away the one traitorous tear that escaped. “I don’t want to hurt you anymore either.”

“Can you forgive me for the things I said after the binding ceremony? For threatening you and walking away in Boston without giving us a chance?” she asked.

He placed a soft kiss on her forehead. “I can forgive you for that if you can forgive me for the way I ended things after Paris.”

“I still don’t understand why—” she started.

Benjamin cut her off. “I was in love with you, Kailani.”

She frowned. “I…I know. I mean, I loved you too, and at the time, I was sure you loved me.” She eyed him. “But when you broke up with me, I questioned it.”

“When I say I was in love, I don’t just mean sort of in love. Or young love. I knew…I knew when I was twenty-one that what I felt for you was the kind of thing that would never fade.”

Kailani’s heart clenched.

“I meant what I said on the plane. You were my first love…and I thought that if I didn’t break up with you, walk away from you, you’d be my only love.”

“What?”

“Kailani, I fell in love with you then, and I’m still in love with you now.”

Kailani gasped, her world tilting on its axis.

“If we’d stayed together the way I’d planned—a casual but hot relationship that lasted years—I would have been so irrevocably in love with you, I wouldn’t have been able to let you go. I was already thinking about what we’d do. Where we could go, where we could disappear to that the Trinity Masters would never find us.”

His words shocked her, but she understood. Remembered feeling the same, remembered her fantasies about them being married, but in her fantasies, it was only ever just the two of them.

“I was so in love with you,” she confessed. “It killed me when Theia called and told me you were dating someone just a couple weeks after we split up. It made me think what we’d shared hadn’t meant anything to you.”

“It meant everything to me. I was desperate to not love you, so I did what any twenty-one-year-old guy would do. I tried to fuck you out of my system.”

Kailani rolled her eyes. “That’s not how you nurse a broken heart.”

“Of course it is,” he said with the kind of complete authority only Benjamin could manage.

She shook her head, but she was smiling.

His expression softened. “I kept trying to find ways to forget you, but instead, all I found were women who couldn’t hold a candle to you.”

“That’s ridiculous.” There was no heat behind her words, just faint shades of the way they used to be, back when they were friends and playfully gave each other shit.

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