“How is it?” she asked. Thankfully, she drew her hand and temptation away and watched him chew.
He swallowed. “Fantastic, as usual. The woman is a culinary genius.”
Something in her eyes made his heart skip a beat. He still couldn’t believe she was here with him. Already, he dreaded the day she’d leave. “So, how much time were you able to take off?”
“Not enough,” Jannie muttered.
“Why do you say that?”
She bit into the tart in the exact same spot he had, sending tingles racing up his spine. The woman could make biting into a pastry sexy.
She took her time chewing, and he could tell she was hesitant to say.
“Jannie?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s something. Talk to me.”
She picked up the lemon tart, and he watched her tongue swipe across her lips before she took a little bite.
Tearing his gaze away, he picked up the last pastry, a masterpiece of hazelnut and chocolate, admiring its elegant decorative swirls.
“Well,” she began, “some choices I made early on might not have been the best.”
He sank his teeth into the decadent dessert, mentally calculating how much extra gym time this would cost him. “Which ones?”
“Choosing medicine.”
He nearly choked on the pastry. “What? You can’t be serious.”
“As serious as the cliché about the heart attack.”
“But you love being a doctor.”
“Do I?” Her smile was bitter, something he’d never seen on her face before.
“You don’t?”
Her smile faded to contemplation. “I’m going to be honest with you. Those who think doctors are highly rewarded and fulfilled by their workhave clearly never been doctors.”
“But you’ve always dreamed of becoming a doctor. It’s what you said you wanted to do.”
“Yeah. I wish I’d known what’s involved. If someone had told me, I never would have done this.”
He stared at her, dumbfounded, shocked beyond knowing what to say.
“What is it that makes you unhappy? It can’t be taking care of people.”
She shook her head. “That’s the good part. It’s what comes with it that stinks.”
He leaned forward. “Tell me.”
“Well, for one, I got into medicine and found it full of red tape and bureaucracy, and I can’t even help people because the insurance companies deny most of what I try to do.” Her eyes flashed, and he could hear the bitterness and frustration in her tone.
He kept his gaze fixed on her face, a part of him struggling to wrap his brain around what she was confessing. “You said ‘for one.’ What else?”
“People hate us.”
