‘I’ll bring in a tray, shall I?’

‘Yes, please.’ Erin was so grateful she could have hugged him. How had he guessed that the last thing they needed was a formal breakfast? ‘That’d be lovely.’

‘Coming right up.’ He left them to it, and Erin never knew what an effort it had been for him not to sit down and hug the lot of them.

It had cost to get them breakfast.

Matt had come in from the paddocks to find his weekly housekeeper, Mrs Gregory, hard at work. He had a cow in calf in the home paddock and, after a sleepless night, he’d decided he’d be happier checking on her than staring at the ceiling. His cow now safely delivered, he’d come in to find Mrs Gregory already sniffing lugubriously over the marks on the carpet.

‘Charlotte rang me,’ she said before he could say a word. ‘I knew how it’d be, so I decided it was my Christian duty to get here early. Those dratted children. You saved them, didn’t you? Why you had to offer to take them in…’

‘I guess it was my Christian duty,’ he told her and she didn’t even smile.

‘Hmmph. Those twins. And that mother of theirs. Oh, you don’t need to tell me a thing about that woman. The whole of Bay Beach knew her before she disappeared with the last of her string of men. If ever there was a no-good, two-timing-’

‘Hey, you can’t place the sins of the mother onto the children,’ Matt interceded. ‘She threw the twins out.’

‘Which is saying a lot about the children,’ Mrs Gregory said soundly. ‘That woman’s a slut, and if even she couldn’t put up with them…’

Hmm. ‘Mrs Gregory, how would you like a holiday,’ he said thoughtfully. This wasn’t boding well for the future at all. ‘Erin’s here and, with two adults, she and I can surely do the housework.’

‘She won’t. She won’t even notice if the house is a mess. I know her kind.’

‘She will.’ His lips tightened. Heck, his mother and Charlotte and their set had truly branded Erin. Just because of her father…