up with everyone he knew all of sudden pairing up, anyway? Hell, when he’d called last month, even Aunt May had prattled on about some handsome widower who’d just purchased the house at the end of her street. Gunnar hadn’t bothered to check out the guy, though, because he was pretty sure that within a week of moving in May had known more about her new neighbor than the handsome widower knew about himself.
Gunnar chuckled, guessing that should teach him for introducing May to the World Wide Web eight years ago. What he’d only intended to be a means for them to keep in touch when he was hunting down bad guys had damn near started a small war when the neighbors had realized their Internet access was unusually slow because May was hogging the bandwidth. So, he’d flown back to Reykjavik and quietly persuaded—and paid for—the cable company to run a propriety fiber optic cable directly to May’s house. And the woman still complained it was too—
Gunnar stilled at the sound of an angry shout, immediately followed by a distinctly feminine scream that ended abruptly, both having come from somewhere beyond the two-story camp—which, if he remembered correctly, was where Russo had sent Gretchen and Katy.
Gunnar tore off at a run, catching sight of Niall and Jake and Ike and Welles rushing out of the woods from various directions as they also headed toward the unmistakable sound of a solid object repeatedly hitting flesh, followed by pained grunts. The obvious assault made Gunnar’s heart pound in dread as he envisioned the unresponsive male patient rising up from near death and beating the crap out of Katy or Gretchen.
He rounded the corner of the building three strides behind Jake, only to find Niall MacKeage planted in place. “Nay,” Niall snapped, snagging Jake’s arm and then Gunnar’s, effectively bringing the other men also rounding the camp to a halt. “If we don’t want to find ourselves on the wrong end of that rake,” Niall said calmly over everyone’s heavy panting, “I suggest we let the lass finish.”
Gunnar actually dropped to his knees in relief when he realized that Gretchen was safely out of the fray, that the grunts came from a large, wild-eyed man, and that the solid object triggering them was the handle end of a garden rake, which Katy used to repeatedly knock the guy to the ground every time he rolled away and tried to get to his feet again.
“Stay down,” she told him.
“Go to hell,” the man growled as he struggled to his feet.
Once again, Katy applied rake to rib cage, and the man went sprawling.
Gunnar couldn’t tell how tall he was, since the stupid bastard never made it any higher than rising to one knee, but he had the shoulders of a linebacker and looked to outweigh Katy by at least a hundred pounds.
No, all he could do was stare at the surreal scene, remotely aware of more men arriving only to find themselves equally transfixed by the sight of Katy MacBain relentlessly driving the cussing, combative guy farther away from—
Gunnar shoved at Russo’s leg. “Gretchen,” he said, nodding to their right.
“Shit,” Russo muttered, heading to their downed medic sitting slumped against a tree. One hand clutched her throat and the other held something to her face as she also stared wide-eyed at the one-sided battle.
Gunnar looked over at Katy again as he tried to reconcile the fact he’d been rushing to her rescue only to find himself thinking he should probably rescue the idiot. “Ah, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to be saving people,” he said to no one in particular, “not beating them up.”
Niall crouched to his heels between Gunnar and Jake, who had also dropped to his knees in either relief or disbelief or both. “When Michael MacBain would have been schooling his daughters on how to defend themselves,” Niall said, “he’d have taught them the importance of not letting up until their assailant could no longer get up.”
Well, Katy obviously hadn’t missed any lessons. Less than a minute had passed since Gretchen’s scream, but it felt to Gunnar like time had slowed to a crawl. And he’d swear that, instead of a battle between a drug-hyped gorilla and a woman armed with only a garden rake, he was watching a precisely timed, perfectly choreographed, and strangely beautiful . . . dance.
He stiffened when Katy suddenly backed off enough for the guy to make it to his feet, peripherally aware of Jake quietly