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

After supper, they drank tea in the sitting room, Marmaduke condescending to sit on George’s lap and be stroked. “You know,” George said idly, “I always imagined a cat called Marmaduke would be ginger. I haven’t the faintest idea why.”


“It’s probably the association of words,” Matthew said with a smile. “Marmaduke does sound a lot like marmalade, after all.”


“Why on earth did you choose the name—I assume it was you who named him?”


“Oh yes! He turned up here, oh, at the end of summer, it must have been, looking terribly thin and forlorn. Mrs. Mac wasn’t awfully keen to keep him at first, but we had a very timely infestation of mice which made up her mind for her.”


George gave his friend a sidelong look. “If I were a more suspicious man, I’d wonder if you’d arranged that infestation.”


Chapter 25