“My mum’s blueberry pancakes are perfection.” Tatum bulldozed his way into the awful silence as his new boss continued to glare at him as if Tatum’s lost his ever-loving mind.

Maybe he had because his chatter only seemed to be digging himself deeper into Andrews’s bad books. But the silence was something Tatum had always been compelled to fill, ever since his father had disappeared one morning when he was six years old, never to return, and his whole family had been left reeling with shock.

But seriously, how much worse could the impression Andrew Pearce have of him get? Given he had already managed to accidentally surprise him starkers in his own bedroom?

“Promise you’ll love them,” he continued, his motor mouth doing all the thinking now. “It’s my mum’s special top-secret recipe. Very few people have ever been honoured enough to taste them. Only me and my three older sisters. And their husbands and boyfriends, and my second-oldest sisters Ellen’s girlfriend, Ilse, and my mother’s best friend, Marsha, and her kids, of course. And a few other special people in our neighbourhood, such as the priest, Father Fuller...”

Andrew Pearce seemed momentarily speechless in the face of Tatum’s panic babbling. But then his stomach growled again.

“And I’ve cooked them, so it would be a terrible shame now to let them go to waste.”

He thrust his fingers through the waves of gold-burnished brown hair and swore under his breath. “Has anyone ever told you how damn annoying you are?” he said at last. But the cold, ruthless edge in his voice had softened a fraction. And he had a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Tatum considered it a major win.

“Frequently,” he barreled on. “My youngest older sister, Mel. That’d be short for Melanie, but no one calls her that unless they want to die. So Mel, now, as I was after telling you, she nicknamed me the Jabber Addict. But it wasn’t a compliment, I don’t think.”

“Stop talking.” He held up his hand. “My ears are starting to bleed.”

He bit into his lip to stop the flow of pointless information and nodded as it occurred to him Mr Pearce probably hadn’t heard this much conversation in months. Maybe even longer. How long had he been trapped in his house? Alone. And what had he endured before that? While chained for three months in that hellhole in Texas? It didn’t bear thinking about.

The pulse in Tatum’s chest pounded at the horrifying thought of being so isolated, so alone. On impulse Tatum released a burst of pheromones and his eyes shot up to look at Mr Pearce to see if he had noticed, he, however, sniffed the air silently and sighed, likely not realising it was omega pheromones but thinking it was garden flowers because Tatum was a recessive and his pheromones were very weak in comparison to normal omegas and basically non –existent compared to dominant omegas.

 “I promise not to say another word,” he said gently. “If you’ll just let me fix you a plate of my mum’s pancakes.”