‘I hope you’re right,’ Holly said. She had to resist the urge, as she was standing next to him where he was seated at her large, round table, to run her hand through his hair and caress the back of his neck. Old habits were hard to break, especially as she still felt such a powerful pull of attraction to him, in spite of all that had happened. ‘So, er, what’s the best approach to take for this speech?’ she coughed nervously.

‘Oh, you know, rhetoric, statistics, emotion and cold hard numbers, followed by a punch to the gut to finish,’ Charlie said wryly. ‘All that stuff we learned about how to write a decent speech for GCSE English isn’t that far off the mark, really. I’ve been putting my old English teacher’s advice into practice ever since!’

‘I’m sure he or she would be very proud,’ Holly replied dryly.

Charlie flipped the screen on his laptop and called up a new document. ‘Let’s do this.’

Later on, when she looked back at the hours they spent working on the speech, Holly felt it would all have been covered in some cheesy montage scene in a film; Charlie certainly made a decent-looking leading man, and no mistake. She was amazed at his focus, once he got going, and his organisational skills. The political animal under his skin was in full flow, statistics at his fingertips, pithy and passionate turns of phrase interwoven with the clear, unadulterated facts of the case.

He kept muttering parts of what he’d written, testing the cadences, feeling the rhythms of the words to see if they sounded correct, would engage the House as well as being informative. Holly, who was going through the piles of research materials, kept getting distracted by his voice, which, although not in full public-speaking mode, was still low and authoritative, prompting her to listen. She suddenly had a vision of him as a teenager again, when she’d seen him on the platform at the youth conference, gestures slightly more mechanical, self-consciously intended to imitate the open-handed poses of the politicians of the day, voice mostly commanding but with a tremor of nerves that he, thankfully, seemed to have banished in later years.

Back in the moment, when the thirty-something Charlie rolled up his sleeves to expose his wonderful wrists and forearms, she swallowed back a sudden surge of lust. Power, she thought wryly, even that of a backbench MP, was a decent aphrodisiac when that MP was as good a speaker as Charlie was. But now was not the time for thoughts like that.

It amazed her how much material Charlie would need for a ten-minute speech in the debate. Even accounting for interruptions to allow debate to be free-flowing, he’d have to be prepared. As he wove in statistics with real-life examples from Harry’s life, and those of other CF patients, the speech started to take shape.