Wounds of the heart are the hardest to heal. Solicitor’s clerk George Johnson has a secret goal when he moves into a London boarding house in the winter of 1920: to find out if his fellow lodger, Matthew Connaught, was the wartime traitor who cost George’s adored older brother Hugh his life. Yet the more he gets to know his quarry, the more George loses sight of his mission -- and his heart. Blessed with boyish good looks and charm in abundance, ad man Matthew is irrepressibly cheerful despite having lost an arm in the Great War -- and soon makes plain his attraction to George. As George’s feelings for Matthew grow, so does his desperation to know the truth about what happened that day in Ypres. Even if bringing all their secrets to light means he’ll lose the man he’s come to love.

To Love a Traitor

George cursed himself for not leaving well enough alone when he felt a sickening crunch underfoot. He hadn’t even noticed the pen falling to the floor. And it would be thispen.


Matthew’s cheery knock broke in on his self-recrimination. “Come in,” George called, his voice flat. An instant later, he cursed himself anew. Damn it. This wasn’t going to help him ingratiate himself with the man.


“I say, are you all right?” Matthew asked as he entered. “You look like you’ve lost ten shillings and found a sixpence.”


“Worse,” George replied with a grimace, holding up the crushed remains of what had once been a rather fine Waterman pen. “It’s not the pen, so much—it’s that it used to belong to my brother.”


“What rotten luck. I am sorry.” Matthew hesitated. “He fell in the war?”


Chapter 16