“About your rakish flirting?”

He raised one brow. “Rakish?”

“Yes, rakish. What are you afraid of, that he’ll rescind my hand in marriage? Wait, you do get that I am not actually going to marry you, don’t you?”

He snorted. “Yeah, marriage seems a bit of a long shot at this point. But he is my boss.”

“Well, I have no intention of blabbing to your boss about anything you do in your personal life, and, as your neighbor, I would expect the same courtesy from you. Hell, we can pretend neither of us have ever met my parents. Lord knows I’ve had that fantasy before.” She tried to smile, but another string of sneezes started. She covered her face with one hand as she banged the table in time with her eruptions.

Nadim’s eyes were wide when her nose calmed. “Bless you. You have an adorable sneeze.”

Yes, yes, tiny girl with the bouncy curls and the high-pitched sneeze. She was a damn pixie. She’d heard it so many times and it never failed to piss her off. She usually smiled and said thank you, but with this guy, she said what she usually only thought when someone called her sneeze cute. “Fuck adorable. I feel like shit.”

He chuckled. “You’re nothing like the Reena your father described.”

She snorted. “I thought we were going to pretend we don’t know my parents?”

He winked, smiling. Still a flirt. She needed to figure out how to snuff that out before her inconvenient attraction got out of hand. “Fine,” he said. “You’re a tragic orphan with overbearing parents. A millennial Oliver Twist. But seriously, I owe you for not telling him. Massively. You ever need a neighborly favor, I’m your man.”

What could she possibly need from a man content to live in her father’s pocket, utterly terrified of disappointing him? She dragged the bag of bread closer. “Anyway, they’re fougasse, not baguettes,” she informed him.

“Fou what?”

“Fougasse,” she said, pulling a few of the flat crusty breads out of the bag. “They’re a flatbread originating from Provence, France.”

For a new recipe, she was pleased at how the oval breads had turned out. The lean dough had no fat in it, and deep cuts made the finished crisp, yet chewy bread loosely resembled fall leaves.

Nadim’s eyes widened. “You didn’t seriously make those, did you?”

“Yes. I told you, bread baking is my hobby.”

He leaned a little closer to her, eyes still on the olive fougasse in Reena’s hand. “Are those black olives?”

“Yes. This one is olive and Stilton.” Specifically, tiny black Niçoise olives that she painstakingly pitted before gently folding into the dough so they would stay whole.

“And the other … ” He peeked into the bag.

“Roasted red pepper and Ementaal.”

He frowned. “And they’re seriously not for me?”

She couldn’t help but smile at his hungry eyes as he ogled the bread. She really did have way too much fougasse. What harm could come from sharing bread with a neighbor?