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Dear Thomas,

I have spent every summer of my life with the same core group of people, and yet after your departure it no longer feels as though they are enough.

Charles has been positively miserable, and even the Nelsons are suffering, despite their short acquaintance with you.

I am supposed to be working on the last of the invitations for the ball, but I find my thoughts wandering to you against my better judgment, hence this letter so shortly after the last. You must be sad, too, to have been pulled from us so quickly this summer, and I have to admit that the idea of you thinking of me has sparked an imaginative fire in my heart that I long thought I had quelled.

I know that Rudolph told you about us, and I cannot fault him for doing so.

I was dishonest with you from the onset of your time at Ashford Hall, dishonest through omission, because I saw in your gaze from that very first moment that you thought me attractive.

It is a dangerous thing for men like you and I to recognize one another so quickly, and yet I felt the weight of your eyes on me and I knew.

It was not the same with Rudolph; my attraction to him and our subsequent affair were a result of years of dancing around one another, and yet with you I knew right away that to capture your attention was no small feat.

I do wonder if Rudolph told you as an attempt to warn you away from loving me, which would be prudent.

There is a clearcut path that my life must take, the trajectory of who I am meant to be something that simply cannot change, and since I realized what sort of man I am, I have known that my desires are at odds with what is most needed for my title.

My father’s expectations for me were always high, a necessity of the lordship, and if he knew that I was risking it all for love, the disappointment would kill him all over again.

These letters must work both as a documentation of my feelings and a way for me to convince myself that it is not worth it.

When you were leaving, I could think of nothing more than keeping you; now that you are gone, I can think of nothing except your absence.

Both of these things are a weakness during a time I should be focusing on the diplomacy that comes with hosting a ball, and all I can hope is that my affection for you is a temporary disadvantage, that it will fade as you’re gone and as I write.

Do you know what effect you had on me? I doubt it, or you would not have left. A man like you strikes me as someone who recognizes the attraction he awakens in people. Or perhaps you’ve made it as far as you have without knowing your own charisma, but that seems impossible.

I have spent long enough today musing on your character, and while it is not out of my system, duty calls. I wonder if confiding in Felix would take away some of this dreadful emotion, but I have little hope. This hunger seems ever present.