He’d had ten men with him. Plenty to pillage the natives. Unfortunately they’d been too poor to pillage.
“They offered a sacrifice if we left them alone.”
Alex lifted a brow. “Indian maidens?”
Julian shrugged. “They didn’t have anything else.”
“You took them. In more ways than one.”
“As you pointed out, we were Vikings, and we’d been on that ship for a very long time.”
Alex glanced out the floor-length sliding glass door to her right. “Then all the blue eyes aren’t descended from you.”
“Most of my men were related to me in some way.” It made for less hassle on the high seas. If everyone was related, there was a slimmer chance of not only mutiny, but wholesale slaughter as well.
“Go on,” Alex said.
“I just told you everything.”
“Not everything. Why does an entire Inuit village in the twenty-first century call one man master? Not very PC.”
“PC,” he repeated, his mind churning to find a meaning.
“Yeah, you really fit in,” she muttered. “Politically correct. We did away with master in this country about a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“I didn’t tell them to call me that.”
“You didn’t stop them, either.”
“It’s a courtesy title. It doesn’t have the connotations you’re giving it.”
“They still consider you the boss of them, and I want to know why.”
Julian took a deep breath and continued. “I returned a century ago.”
“Scene of the crime,” she murmured, but he ignored her.
“I brought my wolves. We wanted to live at peace.”
“Alaska is huge. You had to build in their backyard?”
At first Julian had come merely to see the place he’d idealized in his mind, one he’d visited while he was still human. But then he’d caught a glimpse of all the blue-eyed Inuit…
“Family is important.” Especially since he’d thought the only family he had left was Cade. Especially since he’d never have any children, any descendants but the ones he’d found here.
Something flickered in Alex’s eyes. Sadness? Anger? Guilt? He couldn’t say. The expression was there and gone so fast, and he didn’t really know her that well at all.
Not that he wanted to. Not that he would. Once they finished this discussion, he’d leave her to Ella and interact with her as little as possible. Because every time he saw Alex, he remembered Alana.
Eventually.
“I protect them,” he said.
“From what?”
“Everything. Anything.”
“Wow! How did they survive a thousand years without you, Jorund?”