Hart watched her calling encouragement to the two orphaned boys. If they were making progress it was because of her. Both boys adored her. To them she was some magical combination of mother, sister, mentor and playfellow.

And Hart? He was purely dazzled by her.

Family life. He’d experienced nothing like it in his life. She hadn’t grown up in a family either, so how did she know how to do this? Make four very disparate people, including two very different children, happy? But somehow she did.

He’d only married to get an heir, and he’d chosen Georgiana Rutherford because the very sight of her swamped him with desire. And because she was independent and self-sufficient and wouldn’t be a drain on his time.

But she was so much more than he’d expected.

“By the way, I’ve discovered who Danny’s father is,” he told her quietly.

Her head whipped around. “Who?”

“Take a guess.” They’d speculated about it in bed often enough, but there was no proof.

“Phillip’s father?”

He nodded. “I discovered the evidence in the estate record. Lakeside Cottage was only part of one of my cousin’s minor estates. He sold it off piecemeal, a chunk at a time to pay his gambling debts, retaining only the main house by the end. I suppose it would have been the next to go if he hadn’t died. There is a note in the estate records, just over seven years ago, noting a tenant’s cottage and small farm acreage to be transferred to the use of Judith Glover and her child.”

“Danny and his mother.”

He nodded. “Of course I had no idea of this when I sent Phillip to live at Lakeside Cottage.” He glanced at the boys racing each other around the paddock, whooping and laughing. Half brothers. “A mistake that ended well, I suppose.”

He lowered his voice. “The interesting thing was the phrasing of the document. The cottage and farm were transferred ‘to the use of Judith Glover and her child for their lifetime.’”

“But Judith’s dead. And Danny’s no longer there.”

He nodded. “I had the document checked over by my legal man, and I have every right to throw that brute Glover off the property.”

She clapped her hands. “Oh, that would be wonderf—” She broke off. “But what about that poor downtrodden woman and those little children? I can’t see Glover putting himself out to support them if he was put off the farm. He’s the type to look after himself first, and abandon them to their own devices.”