Trapped With Him

Chapter 1: The Last Good Option

The email from Josie Moran arrived at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, which was fitting, because Faye Lanigan's life had been unraveling on Tuesdays for three months running.

She read it twice, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her studio apartment in Portland, surrounded by the wreckage of what had once been a thriving wedding-planning business. Tax notices fanned across the carpet. A cease-and-desist letter from a florist she'd never hired but whose invoices bore her forged signature. The laptop balanced on her knees showed a bank balance that made her stomach clench every time she looked at it, which was why she'd stopped looking.

But this email.

*Ms. Lanigan, I found your portfolio through a friend of a friend. My fiancé and I are getting married December 28th at Frostmere Lodge in the Cascades. Our previous planner dropped out. I know it's short notice—three weeks—but money isn't an issue and I need someone who can make this perfect. Can we talk tomorrow?*

Faye set the laptop aside and pressed her palms flat against the floor, feeling the cold hardwood through her pajama pants. Three weeks. A destination wedding in the mountains in late December with three weeks' lead time. It was insane. It was the kind of job that could go spectacularly wrong in a hundred different ways.

She picked the laptop back up and typed: *I'd love to. How's 9 AM?*

Because the alternative was admitting that Brock Fenmore had won. That the man she'd trusted with her business, her savings, and two years of her professional life had succeeded in dismantling everything she'd built. He'd been her partner at Lanigan & Fenmore Events—her idea, her client list, her reputation—and he'd drained the accounts, maxed the business credit line, and vanished to Sedona with a yoga instructor named Clover, leaving Faye's name on every debt because she'd been the one stupid enough to sign.

No. Not stupid. Trusting. Which, she'd learned, amounted to the same thing.

The call with Josie the next morning confirmed what the email had suggested: the bride was wealthy, well-connected, and desperate in the polished way that people with resources are desperate—not for survival, but for someone to make the mess disappear. Josie Moran was thirty-one, an art curator from San Francisco, marrying Joaquin Romero, a tech executive whose family had money that went back generations. The wedding would be intimate—forty guests—but lavish. Frostmere Lodge was already booked. What Josie needed was someone to handle everything else.

"Our last planner had a family emergency," Josie said, her voice careful and rehearsed in a way that made Faye's professional antennae twitch. "Everything's half-done. The venue's set, the guest list is confirmed, catering is arranged through the lodge. But the décor, the flowers, the timeline, the rehearsal dinner, the music—"

"I can handle all of it," Faye said, and she meant it the way a person standing at the edge of a cliff means *I can fly*—with the desperate conviction that saying it firmly enough might make it true.

They agreed on a fee that made Faye lightheaded. Not because it was exorbitant—Josie was paying market rate for rush work—but because it was exactly enough. Enough to clear the worst of the debt. Enough to keep her business license. Enough to prove that Faye Lanigan could come back from the dead.

She spent the next week in a controlled frenzy. She rebuilt her vendor contacts from scratch, because Brock had poisoned half of them with lies about her reliability. She ordered supplies with money she didn't technically have yet, floating on the deposit Josie wired with reassuring speed. She created binders—physical, color-coded, tabbed binders, because Faye had learned the hard way that digital files could be deleted, accounts could be hacked, and the only thing you could truly rely on was a three-ring binder with laminated dividers.

Three binders. Emerald green for the ceremony. Ivory for the reception. Deep burgundy for contingencies.

The contingency binder was the thickest.

On December 20th, she loaded her rental car with the binders, two rolling suitcases, a garment bag containing her own clothes for the week, and a box of emergency supplies that included everything from safety pins to a portable steamer to a flask of bourbon she had no intention of drinking unless everything went sideways. Then she drove east, into the mountains, following a two-lane highway that narrowed and climbed until the trees pressed close and the sky turned the color of pewter.

Frostmere Lodge sat at the end of a gravel road that switchbacked up the final ridge like a scar. It was beautiful in the way that remote places are beautiful—aggressively, almost threateningly so. The main building was a sprawling timber-and-stone structure with a peaked roof and enormous windows that reflected the surrounding peaks. A scattering of cabins dotted the hillside below, connected by stone paths that were currently dusted with early snow. The air tasted like pine and iron and cold.

Selma Byrne met her on the front porch.

The lodge owner was somewhere north of sixty, with silver hair cut bluntly at her jaw and the kind of weathered face that suggested she'd spent more of her life outdoors than in. She wore a flannel shirt tucked into canvas pants and boots that had seen actual use, and she regarded Faye's rolling suitcases and garment bag with the expression of someone watching a house cat prepare for a safari.

"You're the wedding planner," Selma said. It wasn't a question.

"Faye Lanigan." She extended her hand.

Selma shook it once, firmly. "You're early. Bride's not here until the twenty-third. Most of the guests arrive Christmas Eve."

"I like to get the lay of the land."

"Land's not going anywhere." Selma picked up one of the suitcases without being asked and started inside. "Come on. I'll show you the main hall and you can start measuring things, or whatever it is you people do."

The main hall was magnificent—vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, a stone fireplace large enough to stand in, and a wall of windows that framed the valley below like a painting. Faye could see it immediately: the ceremony space by the windows, chairs arranged in a gentle curve, the aisle runner leading toward that impossible view. The reception in the adjacent dining hall, which had its own fireplace and enough room for round tables of eight. It would work. It would more than work.

She pulled out the emerald binder and began making notes.

Selma watched from the doorway, arms crossed. "You always travel with that many binders?"

"These are the essentials."

"Lord help us."

Faye smiled without looking up. She liked Selma already—the woman had the energy of someone who'd seen enough nonsense to be permanently unimpressed by it, which was exactly the kind of energy Faye needed in her corner.

The next two days were productive. Faye mapped every room, confirmed the catering menu with Selma's kitchen staff, coordinated delivery schedules for flowers and linens, and built a timeline so detailed it accounted for bathroom breaks. She spoke with Josie daily—the bride was finishing up work obligations in San Francisco before flying out—and each conversation left Faye with the same faint unease she couldn't quite name. Josie was enthusiastic but brittle, laughing a beat too late, agreeing too quickly, asking questions that circled back to whether everything would be *perfect* with an intensity that went beyond normal bridal anxiety.

Faye filed the feeling away. Brides were anxious. That was the job—to absorb their anxiety and transmute it into calm. She was good at that. She was good at absorbing.

On December 22nd, the first guests arrived.

And with them came Rhys Farrell.