Page 1 of Trust

Prologue

Jakob Wulf stood and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows. The waves at Sunset Beach were a little raucous, and crazy people were out there trying to tame them. Being a Brit, he didn’t exactly grow up near good surfing. Still, he came from a traveling family—thanks to the multitude of beaches that spanned the globe, but there was nothing like Hawai’i. He’d only been on the island for two days, but he might be in love.

“Hey,” Benedict Kingston broke into his thoughts. “I gotta talk to my uncle about this upcoming invitational, so I’ll meet you on the beach.”

Ben had agreed to show Jake the ropes about surfing. He had to play a surfer in his next movie, and he wanted to know everything there was to know about the competition and the business.

Thanks to his agent, he was now hooked up with the premiere surfing company on the island. His namesake was his father, who moved to the islands and promptly fell in love with a pretty Hawaiian woman. They’d built Kingston Surfing from the ground up. It was a massive company that was still family-run.

“Okay.”

“My sister is down there. She’s a good surfer, so ignore how young she is. Also, since she’s so young, no hitting on her.”

Jakob frowned. He knew he hadn’t always had the best reputation when it came to women. The truth was that about eighty percent of the rumors about him were false. But he never played around with underaged women. He might only be twenty-one, but his mother had raised him better than that.

“No worries, bra,” he said, which made Ben laugh.

“We need to work on your accent, bra.”

Jakob smiled because there was no condemnation in the other man’s tone. He knew Ben respected him because Jakob had spent the last day learning as much as he could about the Hawaiian culture surrounding surfing.

“I’ll see you in a few minutes,” Ben said, smiling as he headed to his meeting.

It only took him about five minutes to get to the beach. Another thing he loved about Hawai’i. You were never that far from the beach. For an Englishman, he had thin blood. He hated London weather. It felt like he never saw the sun there. Here, the sun was almost always shining.

Jakob relished the warm sand as he walked across the beach. He had grown a little facial hair, wore a pair of aviator sunglasses, and had on a Kingston Surfing ball cap. While he didn’t always get recognized, he wanted to avoid it as much as possible. He wanted to just enjoy the beach.

That’s when he saw her again. It was the woman he had been admiring, and she was still killing it. She was coming in on a massive wave that scared the shit out of him, but she seemed to be part of it. Her feet were steady as she maneuvered the board, her long dark hair flowing behind her.

She was magnificent. If he were poetic, he might say she was the goddess Pele reincarnated. As she made her way to the beach, she grabbed her board and moved in his direction. Shewore a wet suit that cut off at the thighs but covered much more than any bikini Jakob had ever seen. Didn’t matter. She was stunning. Her golden eyes widened when she saw him, and she headed his way.

“Trying to stay incognito?”

There was just enough sassy humor in her voice that his mouth twitched. “Something like that.”

“You don’t have to worry much about that today. Lots of surfers out, but they don’t give a damn who you are.”

He glanced around and realized it was true. It was a relief and a bit freeing. He hadn’t realized how tense the paps had made him recently.

“I’m Jakob Wulf.”

She grinned at him, her golden eyes twinkling up at him. “Yeah, I know.”

He rolled his eyes, glad she couldn’t see it behind his mirrored lenses. He didn’t get tongue-tied around women, but this woman was insanely beautiful. And she apparently didn’t care who he was.

He opened his mouth to get her name and hopefully her number when he heard Ben shout his name. Jake turned in the direction of his voice.

“Here comes trouble,” the woman murmured.

Frowning, he glanced at the woman. “You know him?”

“You could say that.”

“Sorry about that. Uncle Abe can be a stickler for details.”

“No worries,” Jakob said.

“You should know better than to get pulled into a meeting with him. He likes the sound of his own voice,” the woman said, but she was smiling.

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