He laughed and sat down on the opposite side of the bed, canted to face her.
“I think I’ll be able to go back to work on Thursday,” she said. “That leaves two days, and I promise you, I’ll go crazy if I have to stay in this bed the whole time.”
She picked up a teacup from the bedside table, wrinkling her nose at the taste. “I’ve never understood the concept of laziness. Doing nothing all day is torture.”
He said, “Maybe this will help,” and put a folder on the bed, a little grubby on the edges, Oscar’s handwriting scrambling over the surface like ants. “I thought you might want to see what Lambert came up with. I brought copies of the Liljestr?m and Campbell reports and the three he finished last night. He hopes to get the last three done by tomorrow morning.”
The smile she gave him took his breath away. He wondered what else would make her smile like that. Diamonds? A trip to London? A hospital of her own?
“Anna.”
She looked up at him.
“What do you like to do for fun?”
Confusion flashed across her face. “What do you mean, for fun?”
And there, exactly, was the heart of the matter. Anna’s heart.
He said, “When you have an hour or a day to yourself and no deadlines and no place to be, when you can please yourself. What do you do?” And then: “This isn’t an exam. There’s no right answer.”
“But there’s always something that needs to be done.”
“This is a hypothetical question. All work done, everything sorted, people looked after, no deadlines. A day free. What would you like to do with that time? What would make you happy?”
“I’m not sure I like this hypothetical question. Is there a trick in it somewhere?”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead, damp and cool. “No. Never mind, it was just a theory I was testing.”
She was frowning at him, but he could almost see her attention drifting back to the folder in her hands. He had his answer: for fun, Anna liked to think about medicine. She liked many other things: coffee and high places, little girls laughing, flower gardens and the sea, but fun was a difficult concept. The stories she told about Sophie and Cap when they were children made him think she once had been able to be spontaneous, but somewhere along the way she had forgotten what it felt like to simply enjoy herself. Outside their bed, at least, she didn’t seem to understand the concept.
She was reading the first report and had forgotten that he was standing there.
He tried to catch the yawn that overwhelmed him, and failed. Instead he got up and began to strip. Jacket, tie, collar. With one hand he started unbuttoning his shirt while with the other he dropped a suspender over a shoulder. Then he saw the look on her face. Astonishment, maybe. Amusement tinged with irritation.
“What?”
“Mezzanotte. You’re standing in front of the windows. Open windows, curtains drawn back.”
He waited, raised a brow.
“What would you say if I stood in the windows and stripped for the whole neighborhood to stare at? You’d be shocked, wouldn’t you?”
“Surprised is more the word that comes to mind. Um, maybe also a little . . . engaged.”
Her jaw dropped open and then closed with a click. “Don’t change the subject. Explain to me this compulsion you have about walking naked around the house.”
He draped his trousers over a chair back and came to sit on the bed, his legs stretched out before him and his hands folded over his middle.
“You know, Savard, for a credentialed doctor and surgeon you can be very prudish.”
She bristled, which was what he was after. And then she surprised him.
“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want to share you?”
He let out a bark of a laugh and she poked him with one finger, hard.
“In some parts of the world women wear dark veils every day, regardless of the weather,” she told him. “Because their husbands don’t want other men looking at them or coveting them. It could work the other way around, too. In theory.”
He ran a finger from her throat to the first button of her chemise, and she shivered.
“How do you know about the habits of veiled women in other parts of the world?”
She sighed in mock irritation and put the folder aside. Jack was quite pleased with her about this, but he didn’t let it show.
“You still don’t understand what kind of place the New Amsterdam is. Poor women come in all colors and shapes and fashions. I’ve treated women from places you’ve never heard of.”
“You think?” He made a rake of his fingers and slid them through a strand of her hair. “I was always good at geography. Try me.”
“Wait.” She jumped up and ran down the hall to a room still filled with unpacked boxes. Because she was wearing a chemise and nothing else, he quite enjoyed this small interruption. She came back at a more measured pace, with a very large book in her arms. “My atlas. This way we can check each other.” She dropped it on his lap.