“So you promote homewrecking then?” Thomas thought he was reading between the lines, but in truth he was reading a completely different book.
“Homewrecking?”
“Yes, breaking up marriages. You advise women to leave their husbands, don’t you?”
“A woman leaving an abusive marriage is not homewrecking because there is no home to wreck. It’s freedom.”
“Freedom from her cushy life eating bonbons and painting her nails while her husband pays the bills?”
Sam stomped her foot and rolled her eyes. Why was it that men saw themselves as a woman’s savior? As if being born with ovaries and a uterus somehow replaced her brain.
“No. Freedom is being able to practice law, or attend an Ivy League college. It’s when a married woman can make medical decisions for herself.” Sam noted Thomas’s puzzled expression.
“What about all that Civil Rights Act garbage? I thought the law changed that.”
“Laws only matter to the people who follow them. And since that law is only a few years old, no one knows about it so no one enforces it.” Sam huffed. “Did you know that a woman isn’t permitted to receive direct consultation from her doctor about her health? All conversations go through her husband. As if we’re too dumb to discuss our own bodies!”
“Hey, I’m not calling you dumb.” Thomas raised his hands in surrender. “But I have never met a woman who understands the first thing about medicine, let alone wants to discuss it.”
“Then let me introduce you to the first.” Sam held out her hand, shaking his. “I would love to discuss it, and I happen to know a lot about medicine.”
“Do you?” Thomas challenged faintly. It was apparent the kava root was kicking in as his eyelids drooped.
“I research homeopathic medicine and lifestyle changes as alternatives to certain prescription drugs,” Sam added after a beat, wondering if he was still awake.
Thomas shifted, and his eyes blinked wide open. “Oh, that’s what I do—I own a pharmaceutical drug company. We share something in common: We both cure people.”
“Well, they’re not exactly the same thing. Yours are made in a lab, while mine are made in nature.”
Thomas chuckled. “Ah, you’re one of those types, aren’t you? A tree-hugger.”
“And what’s wrong with hugging trees? The oxygen they supply is essential to all life, you know. They could use a little gratitude.”
“Just because pills don’t grow on trees doesn’t make them inherently evil.”
“I’m not suggesting that all medicine is bad, but it shouldn’t be the first reaction to a health issue. It should be a last resort.”
“Not every illness can be cured with whatever potion you’ve thrown together in your cauldron.”
“You make it sound like my work is a joke.”
Thomas slid closer, tucked her hand in his, and kissed her knuckles. An unwanted rouge spread up Sam’s neck as she sensed trouble.
“Samantha—Sam,” he corrected, a courtesy Sam appreciated, and he pressed her hand to his heart, “the people that consistently make easy choices that destroy their bodies will never make the tough choices to save them. Modern medicine offers one thing that your natural cures never will: a quick fix.”
“And I would argue that nothing truly offers a quick fix. It’s like a get-rich-quick scheme—there is always a catch.”
Sam felt his heartbeat quicken beneath his shirt as he leaned toward her, still holding her hand to his chest.
“You want to cure cancer your way? Get rid of all the food on every store shelf and tell the people to start growing their own. But wait! You can’t use pesticides, so there goes most of your harvest to bugs. And those powerlines? You’ve got to get rid of those dangerous electromotive forces. Then we’ve got the steel mills probably giving most of the city lung cancer, so say goodbye to all those jobs and hello to homelessness and dire poverty.” He released her hand and exchanged it for his wine glass. “Until the people you want to help start helping themselves, your way will never work and my way will always end up as their lifeboat.”
Sam reconsidered Thomas Cook, a man she had regarded as carelessly evil but now realized was necessarily evil, not because he wanted to hurt people but because people continued to hurt themselves. Maybe they weren’t at such odds as she had thought.
“What about when your drugs do more harm than good?”
“That’s why we put warnings on the labels.”
“Warnings that doctors fail to inform their patients.”
“Can’t patients read for themselves? It’s called personal accountability, Samantha.”
“According to you, women are too dumb to be personally accountable, Thomas.”
Thomas was growing irritated while Sam was losing her resolve to go through with her clandestine plan. He didn’t want to argue with her, just as Sam didn’t want to defend herself.
“Look, I went into this field wanting to give people a chance at a longer life, with a better quality of life. Why do you assume the worst about me?”
As she heard the conviction of his words, she felt guilty for what she was about to do. “But what do you do when those medicines prove dangerous? Do you pull them off the market… or cover it up so you don’t cut into your profit margins?”
She had stumped Thomas as he faltered for a response that didn’t make him sound as money-grubbing as he was.
“Isn’t it enough that I do rigorous testing, and clinical studies, and get FDA approval? After all of that, if doctors choose not to prescribe it properly or patients abuse it, that’s not on me. That’s on them.”
His rant stopped there, because the truth was that Thomas also felt guilty, but not over what Sam thought he was guilty of. He hadn’t told Sam the full truth.
As much as he wanted to warn her of what was to come, telling her his secret would slam shut any open door to a fun night together. Maybe even a fun summer together, if she played her cards right.
Despite her know-it-all arrogance and suffragette brashness, Samantha Stanton was beginning to grow on Thomas Cook. It wasn’t every day a woman challenged him… and Samantha—rather, Sam—could prove to be quite the challenge.
