she called “basic,” though Cole was pretty sure even those would’ve been hard for him, especially in his work boots, but Steve and Hildy picked up the steps quickly.
It soon became clear they’d done this before.
Charlotte took a step back. “You were holding out on me, Mrs. Hawthorne.”
“Guilty.” Hildy laughed. “We took ballroom dancing lessons a few years ago. I guess it’s like riding a bike.”
“I guess so,” Charlotte said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Some music, please, Brinley?”
The blonde nodded, then pushed play on her phone. A familiar piano intro rang out over the speakers, and after a moment, Adele’s haunting voice filled the space.
To his right, Max stood. “Babe, it’s our song,” he said.
Cole’s eyes shot to him—gangly, smarmy, still-married Max—and he froze.
Their song?
“Max, sit down,” Gemma hissed.
Charlotte beamed, as if it were the most romantic coincidence. “This is your song?”
Max spun around and faced Charlotte. Cole didn’t want him looking at her, let alone talking to her—he had no right to feel that way and he knew it. But he couldn’t help it—Max didn’t deserve Charlotte’s undivided attention.
“It was playing the night we met,” Max said.
The night they met? Gemma had met Max before she met Cole, he’d discovered when the sordid details came out. Max and Gemma, it turned out, had been carrying on for months before she even met Cole.
And while it may have stopped for a little while after the wedding, it didn’t take long for Max and Gemma to find their way back to each other—and Cole was the last person to know.
His mind raced to try and make sense of what Max was saying. Had this been Max and Gemma’s song when she chose it for the first dance the day she married Cole?
Had Max been at their wedding?
Cole couldn’t help it, he scoffed, drawing Gemma’s attention—and, to his dismay, everyone else’s. Charlotte frowned at him.
“Max, let’s not disrupt the class,” Gemma said pointedly.
Slowly, Cole turned toward her, aware that she now wore the same expression she’d worn the night Max rushed in, pleading with her to take him back.
The night Cole learned the truth after three years of marriage.
And that expression said, Caught.
It was in that moment that Cole knew the truth. She’d chosen the song for Max. At their wedding.
“Can you turn that off?” Cole heard himself say.
The blonde’s eyes widened. Charlotte’s frown deepened. Steve and Hildy straightened.
“Turn it off,” Cole said, this time more loudly.
“Dude, relax,” Max said stupidly.
Cole stood, putting it all together. A year later, and he was still discovering new ways that Gemma had betrayed him.
The music came to an abrupt stop.
“Cole, calm down.” Gemma moved between him and Max, holding a hand out as if she could protect her beloved from the man whose life she’d ruined.
“I can’t believe you,” he muttered under his breath. More to the point, he couldn’t believe he ever thought he loved her.
“I told you, Cole.” Her eyes turned innocent. “It’s time to let me go.”
He squeezed a fist, eyeing the two of them, replaying his public humiliation and realizing just how deep it went. There seemed to be no end to her betrayal.
“Is it time for Max to let his wife go?” Cole said.
A gasp raced around the circle, and Cole struggled to keep his mouth shut. He could air it all right there for everyone to hear. He could tell them all the truth about the woman he thought he loved.
How she’d started an affair with a married man months before she met Cole, that she dated Cole only to make that married man jealous, that she trapped him into marrying him by telling him she was pregnant with his baby, and that she invited her lover to their wedding and played “their song” as her first dance with her new husband—a man so smitten, so baffled how he got so lucky he would’ve hung the moon for her.
If he could go back, he’d tell that man what a fool he was to fall for someone so brazenly selfish and wicked.
It wasn’t until they’d been married for two years that he learned the truth—that baby was never his. Gemma had a miscarriage, but if she hadn’t, Cole would’ve loved that child until the day he died.
And finding out it wasn’t his would’ve killed him.
He could spill all of that right here in front of all these people—make sure Max and Gemma shared in his humiliation.
But what was the point?
A hand on his arm startled him back to reality. He