“Language,” Lana and Rocky said at the same time.
“Oh please! Like these two haven’t heard worse between all of us, especially you, Ice.” Sunny rolled her eyes at the two women. “Besides, they are both out like lights.”
Lana turned around in her seat to look at her twins. They were snuggled up together and fast asleep.
Her heart squeezed looking at them both. They were her world. Her everything.
“Alright. Let me go in and turn the porch light on so we don’t stumble over anything carrying them in.” Lana said on a heavy sigh. “I’ll put them in my old room. There’s a guest room and unless he’s changed out the furniture and didn’t tell me, the couch pulls out into a sleeper. You two can duke it out.”
“Sunny can have the guest room. I’ll take the sleeper sofa. Where are you sleeping?” Rocky asked, side-eyeing her.
“My room with the kids. It’s a queen size mattress.”
Lana didn’t wait for their responses. She wanted to get inside before anyone noticed she was here.
Rushing from the SUV, she went up the steps to the porch and unlocked the front door. She reached in to turn the porch light on and then ran back to the vehicle.
She hefted her son out of the back seat while Rocky reached in to grab her daughter. Both women working as if this was what they did all the time with the kids.
While they took care of the kids, Sunny grabbed their suitcases and brought them along with the kids’ pillows and blankets. Once the kids were in bed, she chanced a quick look around.
Her room looked exactly as she’d left it the day she’d shipped out fourteen years ago. Her bed had the same quilt and sheets, even the pillows were in the same spot.
Her dresser was in the same spot against the wall with her trophies for 4-H camp when she was a kid and a few of the ribbons she’d won years ago. Her vanity still had the pictures on in it that she’d taped there of her with the one man who had won her heart years ago.
CHAPTER
TWO
Looking down at her sleeping twins, she couldn’t help the sadness that started to overwhelm her. She placed a quick kiss on their foreheads and quietly backed out of the room.
“Littles still out?” Sunny asked as she stretched on the couch she and Rocky were sitting on.
“Yeah. Didn’t wake up at all. I envy that shit.” Lana laughed as she sat on the love seat and stretched her arms and legs out.
“Me too. Hell, I’m lucky if I can get three to four hours uninterrupted sleep.” Rocky smiled absent-mindedly.
Lana listened to Sunny and Rocky talking about their sleep patterns with half an ear. Looking around, she saw that not much had changed through the years.
The living room set was the same one her father had bought when they had moved to the area in her senior year of high school.
There were no photos of her, the kids, or her late mother on the living room walls. While she knew her father loved her mother, considering he never dated, much less remarried, he took her death hard.
Her mother had been Army Intelligence, one of their best. She spoke six different languages and was a kick ass in the field thanks to her martial arts skills.
It was how her parents had met years ago. Her mother had been assigned to her father’s Green Beret unit as an interrogator and Intelligence collector. As her father once told her, it had been love at first sight for both of them.
When they had married, her mother took a desk position, analyzing data and doing what needed to be done to help the Special Forces teams. After Lana had been born, due to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, due to her mother’s skills, she was back on the teams and being deployed like her father.
Lana had been blessed with thirteen years with her mother before a roadside ambush took out her mother and four of the six-man Green Beret team she was assigned to. Her father became a broken man after that.
His team had been tasked to assist in their rescue but got there too late. When the Army had advised her father of the Medal of Honor her mother would receive for her actions that saved two of the men that survived the ambush when she did what she did, he lost it.
She’d never seen her father scream, cry, rage, or angry in her thirteen years. After that day, she’d never seen him like that again, except where she was concerned or if he was blackout drunk, which was only on the anniversary of her mother’s death.
She had to take that back. The day she told her father she had joined the Army and passed her ASVAB and was going into Human Intelligence, like her mother, was the first time in her life she’d ever been afraid of her father in her entire life.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Rocky asked Lana softly.
