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

“Thank goodness you mentioned it in time,” he said, puffing a little from the dash. “We’d have had to wait another two hours otherwise.”


“Lord, yes,” Matthew began, and broke off, wincing, as the train whistled. “We’d have had to brave the pub after all,” he continued once he could again be heard, “and beg them to feed us some lunch. I’m famished already. By the way,” Matthew added, turning to the only other occupant of the compartment, an elderly lady engaged in knitting what looked like an immense woolly muffler. “Sorry to burst in upon you like that.”


“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” she said with a placid smile. “I’m used to young people. I’ve been down visiting my grandchildren down by the coast, and they’re as lively as anyone could wish for.”


“How many do you have?” Matthew asked with that easy interest he always displayed in other people, and they were off, talking nineteen to the dozen of families, travel, and Christmas before and after the war.


Chapter 58