Page 39 of Merrick

“If I think of something else, you will be the first to know. Oh, stop looking at me like that.”

“It seems as if you’re just doing me a favor.”

“It so happens, I am,” she sighed as he started to glower, “I’m not going to apologize for being honest.”

He felt her shiver slightly and immediately reached for the throw and pulled it over them.

“Better?”

She nodded. “Tell me about this place.”

“My office?”

“Your company, I read somewhere that it was started by your great grandfather and was simply an apothecary shop where he sold medicinal herbs and healing balms.”

He chuckled, feeling his irritation lifting.

She had the uncanny ability to fill him with pleasure one minute and frustrate him the next.

“It was a little more than that.” He settled her on his shoulder and turned so that he was facing her. “Ira Pendergast cared about people and was a born healer. He also had a way with herbs and would study their healing properties and what could be done to give them the necessary boost.

What herbs could be combined to get rid of the malady and so on. People came to him from near and far for something as simple as a rash on the skin to migraines and heart conditions.

He would combine holistic medicine with the proper diet. Before long, he had become very popular and his home where he saw people was no longer able to accommodate them. So, he opened the store.”

She was fascinated by the story and found herself drawn into it.

“He did it with no formal education?”

“It wasn’t until he had come back from serving in the war that he got some training and expanded the store.”

“It wasn’t called Medtech before, was it?”

He shook his head. “It had the unfortunate name of ‘Pen-Med’,” he grinned and shook his head. “It wasn’t until my grandfather inherited the business that it changed to Medtech.”

“Your grandfather was a doctor.”

“Yes. He trained as one – a GP.”

“And your dad as well.”

“A neurosurgeon.”

“Neither you nor your brother followed in their footsteps.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to concentrate on the business aspect of things, so I went to law school.”

“I keep forgetting that you have a law degree,” she murmured.

“And a business one as well. Maurice has an associate degree in business.”

And is constantly in your shadow, she thought. Another thread to tug on.

“You built the company and took it into the twenty-first century. It was mainly a pharmaceutical company before, but now it has holdings all over the world.”

He moved his shoulders restlessly. “Diversification is a way of spreading the profits around.”

“Your company manufactures drugs with little to no side effects. From what I see and have read, that’s a little iffy, isn’t it? To my way of thinking, ‘Big Pharma’ is all about the bottom line and that’s making a profit.”

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