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

“Excellent. The next time my socks need darning, I shall know where to bring them. How did you get out, in the end?”


“I—a friend of my brother’s put in a good word and got me a job at the Admiralty. Managed to get me an exemption that way.”


“That sounds rather exciting. Were you in charge of supervising shipping? Something hush-hush?”


For a moment, George experienced a visceral urge to tell all. To prove he’d also done his bit, in a way. And God knew, he had some stories to tell of their motley band of literature scholars, classicists, and mathematicians. Matthew would laugh his head off over the chap—one of their most brilliant cryptographers—who’d had a bath installed in his office and always insisted that was where he did his best work.


But that was pride talking, and vanity.


“No, no.” He examined his fingernails. “Dreadfully dull, really. Mostly filing.”


Chapter 43