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

“Eleven.” He’d been so proud to be entrusted with a gun at last. As if he were a grown man, at least in his father’s eyes.


Matthew’s voice shook slightly. “George…I saw a lot of dreadful things in the trenches, but you know what the worst of it was? Watching men—friends—go to pieces from the horror of it all. And God, man, you were only a child! It’s no wonder such a terrible accident left you with a lasting dread of firearms.”


“It was over a decade ago! Only a coward still runs from the things he feared as a child!”


Chapter 28