Rematch (The Reed Brothers Book 22)

1. Seth

I’m not going to lie. Flying private is pretty damn dope. We don’t have to go through the regular security protocols or stand in any lines. And we don’t have to fight the crowds of people who always try to get the Reed brothers’ autographs. Instead, we get off the big buses that took our whole family—yes, all of us—to Lake Fisher for the Christmas holiday, and we board a commercial jet bound for New York so we can go back home. Minutes after we board, the pilot announces that we should fasten seatbelts, and then we’re in the air. And it’s not until after we get in the air that they ambush me. I should have seen it coming. I really should have. Because while the Reed brothers might be kind and generous, they’re also nosy as fuck.

I look up to find the five Reed brothers and Edward settling into seats near me, all of them converging to make a circle around me. “What’s up?” I ask as they all stare at me. Logan is the last to arrive, and he has one of his kids balanced by his butt against his forearm, kind of halfway asleep against his shoulder, and the newest Reed kid, who is only a few days old, is bundled in a blanket in the crook of his other arm. “Hold this,” he says as he hands me the baby, and I take it because when somebody holds out a baby and says, “Take it,” you sort of feel obligated to take it.

I look down into his little red face. He has baby acne, which Aunt Sky always assures me most babies get. He looks kind of like a potato might look if you wrapped a potato in a blanket, painted on a few slits for the nose, eyes, and mouth, and added a few little red dots across its nose. He’s a cute potato, though, if you were ranking potatoes by something other than their ability to become French fries.

“What do you want me to do with it?” I ask.

Logan snorts. “Hold him. My hands are full.” He adjusts his other kid’s legs around his waist so that the kid is leaning on him, completely asleep, his mouth hanging wide open, and a string of drool rolling out of his mouth onto Logan’s sweatshirt. Logan doesn’t seem to mind, nor does he attempt to wipe it away. “Got a little drool right there,” I say, pointing to his shirt.

“It’s fine,” he says. “Emily fell asleep, and I didn’t want anybody to wake her up.”

Finally, he sits back with a sigh and stares at me. I look from one to the other of them, and they’re all looking at me. Matt has one eyebrow arched in my direction as he leans his weight primarily on one elbow on the armrest of the seat next to me. Logan is on one side, Matt’s on the other, and the other four, including Edward, are turned around backward in the seats in front of me, looking over the back.

“Did somebody die?” I ask. I look toward the back of the plane. Aunt Sky waves at me from her seat. She grins, which is fucking weird.

“Did you talk to her?” Matt asks.

I look down at the wrapped bundle in my arms. I thought it was a boy. “Was I supposed to? He’s asleep.” I thought I could just hold him.

“Not the baby, dumbass,” Paul admonishes.

I look around. “Then who?”

“Gabby, numbnuts,” Pete says. He waggles his brows at me. “She did punch you in the face, you know.”

“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way. You guys really helped in that situation.” I grit my teeth together. We’d been playing a game of football, and Gabby, the daughter of the people who own Lake Fisher, the place where we all went for Christmas, threw the ball back in bounds and hit me right in the face. They’d all stood around, high-fiving one another, while my nose had bled. In their heads, they’d already started planning our wedding because there’s a Reed brothers rule that if a woman hits you in the face, you marry her. Right away.

“Did you explain it to her?” Logan asks. “Did you explain why we thought it was so funny?”

“I didn’t get a chance,” I admit. She’d refused to talk to me anymore after I’d blurted out that I didn’t want to marry her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry her. I didn’t want to marry anyone. And I particularly didn’t want to tell a woman I really like a lot and would love to spend more time with that my family thought we should elope immediately in order to fulfill a stupid family tradition. “She hates me now anyway,” I mutter.

Sam rests his chin on the back of the seat in front of me, which makes his head bob up and down when he speaks. “So, what are you going to do about it?”

“Do about what? What are you guys even doing right now?” I ask. It’s like they’re staging an intervention or something. My voice is loud enough that the baby in my arms jerks inside his blankets. I lay my hand on his chest, and he immediately gets still. I look up at Logan. “Did you name this thing yet?” I ask. I point toward the little face. “I keep thinking of it as ‘the littlest Reed.’”

He chuckles. “Em has been calling him Jimi.”

I must look confused.

“One of the greatest electric guitar players of all time,” he goes on to clarify. “According to Em.”

“Jimi,” I say quietly. He doesn’t stir. “That’s so much better than what I was calling him.”

“Yeah, well, I called you a few things when I saw how you fucked up that whole ball to the nose thing,” Edward says.

“See, the thing is,” Matt starts. He stops for a second, like he’s weighing the weight of the words. “We feel a little guilty about how all that happened. We were fucking around, and she had no idea what was going on, and you didn’t explain it very well, and we’re afraid that we might have contributed to her hating you.”

“You think?” I toss back.

He grimaces. “We’re pretty sure.”

“I think her feelings were hurt, particularly since she was the only one cut out of it all. So, we think you should go and find her as soon as school goes back into session, and you need to apologize to her for us.”

“Why should I apologize for you?” I’m not their father. I’m not even their kid.

Paul glares at me. “Because if you don’t, we’ll probably all feel led to go and apologize to her ourselves.”

I heave out a sigh. I wouldn’t push this group on an unsuspecting person. “Fine. I’ll apologize for you.”

“So, here’s what you should say,” Pete begins.

I hold up a hand. “No, no, no, no, no.” He bites his lips together. “I know how to apologize. I can handle it.”

“It’s important,” Edward says. “Because I’m pretty sure she felt like we were all making fun of her, and that’s not settling right with me.”

“Or me,” Sam adds quietly.

“Or any of us,” Paul adds. “It was just so fucking weird that it happened when we were all together.”

“Or that it happened at all,” Matt adds. “So, we just want you to extend our apologies. You think you could do that?”

“Sure,” I say slowly. “Is that all this is about?” I look at them each in turn again.

They nod. “Unless you want some advice about how to get her to like you again.” Pete winks at me dramatically.

“No thanks. You guys made this mess to start with.”

Logan chuckles. “Fine. But let us know if you need advice. And let us know how it goes.”

I won’t tell them anything about how it goes because it’s not their business.

“I’m sure we’ll see her at your first home match, anyway, right?”

I nod. “Probably.”

One thing about this family that I can always count on is that they show up for events. It might not be all of them—because good God who wants all of them to show up—but it will always be at least some of them.

“If she still hates us when we see her, we’ll know you suck at apologies.”

“Or it may just mean that you all really pissed her off,” I toss back.

The four of them in front of me scatter back to the back of the plane, and Logan kicks his seat back and closes his eyes. He opens them a second later and asks, “Are you okay holding him?”

I look down at Jimi. He’s still sound asleep.

“Sure. Why not?”

Logan closes his eyes, and almost immediately, a snore bursts from his open mouth.

I look down at Jimi. “That’s your dad, snoring like a train. Yep.” Jimi keeps sleeping.

I use the time before we land to figure out how in the hell I’m going to apologize to Gabby and how I can explain it all. It wouldn’t matter so much to me, but my mom once told me that if I make a mistake, I need to own it. And that’s precisely what I’m going to do. I’m going to follow my mom’s advice.