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

It was also a rather essential requisite, he imagined, for a German spy.


“It was almost the death of me, though,” Matthew went on idly, apparently oblivious to George’s discomfort.


“Speaking German. Nearly did for me, during the war. Should have done, by rights. I was supposed to go on a patrol, but I had the most beastly luck—or the most marvellous luck, I suppose I should say, as it turned out—and took a bullet the night before. Another man went in my place.”


“And he died?” George’s heart was pounding. He’d imagined he’d have to bring the conversation round to that incident by slow degrees. To have Matthew bring up the subject of his own accord was either an incredible stroke of luck—or deeply suspicious.


“They all did. All three of them. Private Roberts, Corporal Wilson, and Captain Cottingham.”


George hoped his jolt at the name hadn’t been visible. It was absurd—he’d known, after all, it was coming. Somehow that had seemed to make it worse.


Chapter 32