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

“So tell me about him,” Matthew said reasonably enough. “What was it about him that made him so much better than you?”


“If he was here now, you wouldn’t have to ask,” George said with a sad smile. “He was simply…Hugh. Everyone loved him. He could turn his hand to anything, and you never saw him without a smile on his face.”


“God, no. He was far taller, and broader across the chest. Fair-haired, too—Mother always used to say he was the very image of our father when he was a young man. I take after her side of the family, of course. Hugh’s shadow, she used to call me when I was a child—I was always following him about, and being smaller, and dark, made it even more apt, I suppose.” George stared unseeingly across the fields. “He was frightfully good at everything he tried. And fearless, too. He’d take a leap at any fence you cared to name, for a bet or a dare. Almost broke his neck a dozen times.”


Chapter 46