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

“You can bet I did. Him what gave me this?” Phillips pointed proudly to his black eye. “He’s wearing his jaw in a sling now. The police, which for all they’re the tools of an oppressive regime, treated us very fairly, said we was all as bad as each other and we was to be bound over to keep the peace.”


“Hmph. Does that mean you’ll henceforth hold your peace about your wretched socialism? If I’d known that was all it would take, I’d have slugged you in the eye myself a long time ago.” Fighting words, perhaps, but they were said in a tone of fond exasperation, and Phillips appeared to take them in that spirit.


“You can knock me down, Mr. Mitchell, as many times as you has a mind to, but I’ll stand straight back up for my beliefs,” he said with a proud smile.


Mitchell shook his head and addressed George. “You see how it is? There’s no helping the man. None at all.” He bent his head back to his work, while Phillips gave a raucous laugh and took out his pen.


Chapter 23