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With that said, I hurried into the house, my heart pounding in my throat.

I was frightened, genuinely frightened, that if I returned to London I would not have the opportunity to leave again.

The fact that Landry’s trial had been moved was almost unheard of, and it spoke to something greater, something strange; not for the first time I was concerned that Louis Garretty had discovered that it was Ashford Hall where I was spending my summer and was doing his best to put an end to it before I could find out what he had done.

If that was the case, I doubted very much that he would just allow me to return once the trial was finished, and the idea of being separated from people who I had genuinely begun to think of as dear friends was a terrible one.

Even so, my feet were not carrying me back to the garden where I had left the Nelsons and Charles.

I was moving, almost of my own accord, up the grand staircase and to the left, towards the great library where I knew Arthur was.

I reached it, out of breath and flustered, and took a few moments in front of the door to smooth down my hair and settle myself.

I don’t know why my impulse was so strong, but I had to be the one to tell him I was leaving, had to see his face when he heard the words come from my lips.

I knocked and heard him answer from inside. “Come in.”

The door swung open readily at the touch of my hand, and I stepped inside, closing the door behind me.

Arthur was seated at his desk, letters scattered around in front of him.

Since I had been here, I had begun to realize how many people wrote to him, asking for money or time or help or anything he was willing to give, and with Felix now running the day-to-day operations of the hall, it had fallen to Arthur to reply lest he inadvertently cause offense.

Arthur looked up, and I was touched to see that there was that slightest of smiles on his face, the gesture almost impossible to see unless you were, as I was becoming, familiar with his usual expression.

Almost immediately, however, his expression grew sober, and he rose from his chair.

“What’s happened? Weren’t you at lunch? Why do you look so winded? ”

“It’s okay,” I said, but my tone apparently did little to convince him of this and he came around the desk to stand in front of me.

A shudder passed through me as I saw the concern in his eyes, the news I had to give him dying in my throat.

I didn’t want to leave, but to allow a man I knew to be innocent to face trial alone or, even worse, with Louis Garretty at his defense, was antithetical to why I had become a lawyer.

“There’s a clerk from my office come to take me back to London. ”

“Back to London,” Arthur repeated, his brow furrowing as he took in those words and seemed to realize what I was telling him. “You’re leaving? Tom, I—Is there no way you can continue your work here?”

“I have a trial. I had no intention of leaving, but the date was moved and I have no choice. Believe me, no part of me wants to leave behind Ashford Hall so quickly. These few months seem like not enough time in the slightest.”

Arthur had begun to pace back and forth, fiddling with the ivory cufflink on his left wrist. “I see,” he said after what felt like an eternity. “How long will the trial last?”

“I’ve no idea. A week, perhaps more. It’s a complex case with a huge log of evidence, and the prosecutor is… a dogged man, who is sure of my client’s guilt. I’m sure he’ll attempt to drag out the proceedings.”

“But you’ll return?” Arthur asked. “The ball is at the beginning of September.”

Of course. The words were ice thrown in my face, a needle driven into my heart, and I immediately saw that Arthur’s concern about my sudden business in London was not because he truly wanted me to stay at the hall but rather because my departure would undoubtedly put a damper on the ball.

An annual tradition for the Ashford family, the ball was something I had heard plenty about from Charles over the years and had hoped to attend during this summer stay.

Since it was usually held on the second Saturday of September, I had a mere three weeks to wrap up my business in the city and make it back in time.

I wondered how many people Arthur had already told of my attendance.

I’m sure my presence would cause some stir, a lower-class man and a lawyer at that.

While at any other time I would have felt guilt, I was so stung by the realization that he was more concerned about the possibility of me missing the ball than he was about our time together being cut short that I found it exceedingly difficult to feel anything beyond irritation.

I had practically run here in order to say goodbye and was yet again reminded of Rudolph’s warning that the man I was so attracted to was incapable of feeling the same in return.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and my tone must have been so icy that even Arthur noticed, his gaze turning to me with some surprise.

It was laughable, how easy he had become to read in the last two months and yet how far out of my reach he still remained, how I could interpret a flick of his eyes or a twitch of his lips and yet could not figure out what lay underneath it all.

“I have a feeling that this sudden trial update has less to do with the judge’s availability and more to do with Louis Garretty discovering where my summer is being spent. ”

“And so he schemes to take you away from us,” Arthur muttered, a note of disdain in his voice.

“I see,” he repeated, and he stopped his pacing, turning to face me.

He stepped in my direction, clutching his hands together behind his back and looking at me with knitted brow.

For a brief moment I wished desperately that his face, those eyes, could be captured in paint so I could gaze upon it for all eternity, grow old a man driven to madness simply because of a hunger he could not sate.

“If you must go, you must go, but I will come to London to fetch you myself if you are not back in a fortnight, Thomas.”

“Yes, forbid I do not return in time for your ball,” I said, and he searched my face briefly before a pink flush came into his cheeks. When he next spoke, it was with such vehemence that I was very nearly taken aback.

“Damn the ball! Having you back here has nothing to do with the ball, and I would not care tomorrow if every last invitation returned with a refusal! You are a fool if you believe that my reasons for wanting you here have anything to do with a silly gathering, and not for something far more—” He stopped himself, dragging his hand over his mouth and looking at me with an intensity that I had not seen before, not even during that first argumentative night.

“Never mind. Go to London if you must, but for God’s sake come back. ”

I couldn’t understand what had caused the sudden flare of emotion, unable to tear my eyes from him, his face now a lively shade of pink, even the tips of his ears flushed with color.

A memory of Charles from university surfaced, a confession he had made regarding a girl he had met and he was enthralled with.

His ears had gone that same pink at the tips, his embarrassment of emotion so overflowing that it had burned hot through all of him, and the longer I looked at Arthur the more I became convinced that the emotion I had awoken was of the same vein.

“Finish what you were going to say,” I said, bolder than I thought I was capable of being. “Something far more what, Arthur?”

“I won’t say,” Arthur said, and whatever had been on his lips was gone now, lost to his own stubborn pride.

For a moment it had been possible to convince myself, however stupid it was, that the lord had been on the cusp of some sort of confession.

As he stood there looking at me, however, I realized just how fanciful that idea was.

He had been no closer to admitting any sort of feelings for me than he had been before my announcement.

Rudolph Nelson was correct in his assessment that Arthur Ashford would always do the right thing for his title, and not for the matters of his own heart.

“You don’t want me to return to London because you worry what I’ll tell Garretty,” I said, and Arthur had such a violent reaction to that statement that I knew I’d hit the nail on the head, his head snapping towards me from where he’d been pointedly staring at the wall.

“I have no desire to tell him a thing about you, Arthur. I am not a snake in the grass here.”

Arthur continued to stare at me, and when he spoke it was now his turn for ice-cold words, his tone more dismissive than I had heard it until now.

“If that is what you want to believe of me, then fine,” he said.

“I think you a rat who would go crawling back to your mentor and expose whatever family secrets you’ve dredged up, Thomas.

Is that what you would like to hear? That I still think of you the way I thought when you first arrived? If it pleases you, I can be that man.”

I was momentarily stunned, speech failing me as I looked at him.

This was not a man who was speaking out of genuine dislike or a desire to wound; I had seen it in clients before.

This was a man who was putting a wall back up, a wall that I had painstakingly dismantled over the last month. “Arthur, no—”

“You’ve made it quite clear what you think of me, Mr. Whitmore ,” he said, my formal name dripping from his tongue like venom.

“That despite my best efforts you still think that I have no use for you. Then don’t allow me to disabuse you of that notion.

” A knock came at the library door, and he turned away from me, his shoulders a tense, cold line. “Have a safe journey.”

“Tom, the carriage is ready,” Felix said, poking his head in the library; if I had been able to take my eyes off Arthur, I know I would have seen Felix recoil from the tension in the air. “Said your goodbyes?”

I stared at Arthur’s back, watching as he returned to his desk.

Instead of sitting, he leaned his hands against the wood, head bowed as though in thought, and I had to physically force myself to stop looking, turning to hurry towards the escape Felix had provided from the situation of my own making.

The disgusting, creeping guilt worming its way through every single inch of my body would not dissipate, and as I hurried down the stairs towards the carriage that would take me back to London, I found myself wondering if I would ever lay eyes on Ashford Hall—and its beautiful, enigmatic master—again.