I'm getting the "run-time error 13 - type mismatch"...

I'm trying to get at the value of a set of merged cells, except that
the cell my formula is going to a middle cell of the merged set, not
the left-most.

Cells C1:F1 are merged together and the value is the date 2/10/09

I'm trying to access the value of the cell, but may not necessarily be
using the left-most cell in the set of merged cells, like this:

Sub Testing()
x = Range("A1").Offset(0, 3).Value
MsgBox x
End Sub

Is there a better way to do this? So that if the code happens to call
at the middle of the merged cell set, it does not generate an error?