Spirited Ride by Rebecca Avery

and approach the door as well.
    Encouraging him to start dating again would be the prudent thing to do. It might even make the divorce process go a little smoother, as Becca had put it, but she just couldn’t… especially not with Gina of all people.
    “I’m sorry… I didn’t know you had company,” she said, turning away. She actually felt physically sick at the thought of the two of them together.
    “I come over here to keep him from showing up and irritating you at the bar tonight… and then what do you do? You show up here instead?” Gina laughed. “Help me to help you!”
    Relief like a cool breeze on a hot summer day first soothed her… then it irritated her because it had merely blown her true feelings to the surface . Jealousy. She’d been jealous of Gina!
     

Chapter Six
     
    TJ had never been so happy to see an outraged Sherri in his whole life. Gina wasn’t trying to help anyone but herself. With friends like Gina, who needed an enemy? He’d tried so many times to show Sherri that when they’d been together with no success.
    Even though Gina hadn’t been that great of a lead singer, she was good at making people see what she wanted them too. From the looks of it, she’d only perfected that craft over the years.
    He thought after sending Gina back to Florida ten years ago that would be the end of his discomfort where she was concerned. He hadn’t even been back a full month and here she came again, bumping into him in odd places, as though to ensure he walked around wary all the time.
    Catching her out and about with Chris Anderson made him realize that Gina seemed to have an affinity for whomever Sherri was dating. The more the guy liked Sherri, the harder Gina went after him.
    The woman had serious issues. Sniffing around another woman’s man just because… was pretty messed up… especially if you were supposed to be her friend.
    This time when he’d opened his apartment door to find Gina on the step, he’d been surprised that rather than having to practically fight her off of him, she’d breezed around him and flopped down on his garage sale couch.
    It wasn’t until she opened her mouth with lies about what she’d been doing with Chris that the familiar uneasiness returned with a vengeance. Her bullshit talk about how she’d been encouraging Chris to work things out with Sherri and take their relationship to the next level had been more than he could stomach.
    When he asked her if it was hard to talk to a man with your tongue down his throat, her whole demeanor had changed. Suddenly she began to calmly threaten him with anything she could think of that might make his return after all these years even harder than it already was.
    Now his life in this sleepy little town might get even worse … because it was hard to say what the guys might hear or what Sherri would believe coming from her longtime friend.
    Then like his saving grace, Sherri had shown up pounding on his door demanding he open up. He thought this time Gina would be found out for the bitch she really was. Yet again she’d managed to worm her way out of the deceit and lies she surrounded herself in.
    As much as his heart wanted to tell Sherri the truth about what was going on, he worried that Gina was right. Sherri wouldn’t believe him or even worse… if she did believe him… it would hurt her and he could tell she was struggling with her feelings about his return from Nashville already.
    Whenever Sherri felt like she was being abandoned or forsaken by someone, she would first strike out with the force of a hurricane, going for the jugular vein every time. Afterward though, the hurt she felt would nearly destroy her.
    Memories of finally getting her to tell him a little bit about losing her parents and the fear she felt having to look out for Lilly at such a young age flooded his mind. Once she’d finally cried and raged over it for a couple of hours, they’d spent the next four days in bed while she worked out her