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The temperature increase of a thin water layer is investigated, both experimentally and numerically, when the layer is heated by an infrared laser. The laser is focused to a waist of 5.3 microm inside a 28 microm gap that contains fluorescent aqueous solutions between two glass slides. Temperature fields are measured using the temperature sensitivity of rhodamine-B, while correcting for thermal diffusion using rhodamine-101, which is insensitive to temperature. In the steady state, the shape of the hot region is well fitted with a Lorentzian function whose width ranges between 15 and 30 microm , increasing with laser power. At the same time, the maximum temperature rise ranges between 10 and 55 degrees C and can display a decrease at high laser powers. The total energy stored in the sample increases linearly with the laser power. The dynamics of the heating occurs with two distinct time scales: (i) a fast time ( tau_{Theta} = 4.2 ms in our case) which is the time taken to reach the maximum temperature at the laser position and the maximum temperature gradient, and (ii) a slow time scale for the spatial profile to reach its final width. The temperature field obtained numerically agrees quantitatively with the experiments for low laser powers but overpredicts the temperature rise while underpredicting the profile width for high powers. The total energy shows good agreement between experiments and simulations for all laser powers, suggesting that the discrepancies are due to a broadening of the laser, possibly due to a thermal lensing effect.