Page 4 of Trust

“They weren’t working.”

Alarm rushed through him. “What happened? Did you get hurt?”

She shook her head as she frowned at him. “I noticed the problem before anything happened. And apparently, I’m not hurt. I’m fine.”

“Why didn’t Ben call me?”

She frowned at him. “Why would he?”

Exactly.

“Besides, he acted like it was no big deal.”

“What the hell?”

She snorted as she started up the SUV. “But don’t worry. I know how you like the sun.”

Lani hit a button, and that’s when Jakob noticed the SUV had a sunroof.

He said nothing as they headed out of the parking garage and the airport. The Honolulu Airport wasn’t big. Only so many flights could come in daily, so it wasn’t the nightmare that LAX or Heathrow was. It was something he was looking forward to once he moved here.

He’d just signed on to the new showTask Force Honolulu. No one but the studio and his people knew about it. The announcement would come in the next two weeks. Well, he had told his family. Jules was thrilled. His mother and his sister-in-law Nicola—not so much. It was weird that within the last few years, he had gained a sister-in-law he adored and a brother-in-law he admired.

“What’s that smirk for?” Lani asked as she took the onramp to H-1 West.

“I was thinking about my siblings getting married and how I went from two to four siblings. It’s nice. You’ll see.” She snorted, and his smile faded. “What’s that for?”

“What?”

“The snort.”

She sighed. “Royal doesn’t like me.”

“That can’t be true.”

“It’s okay,” she said, dismissiveness filling her voice. “I don’t like her, so we’re even.”

“What? Why?”

Her shoulders were hunched in a little. Alarm sped through him. Lani wasn’t the type of woman to hunch her shoulders. It was then that he realized she was taking the exit for H-3.

“I thought we were going to go see Ben first?”

“We are,” she said.

“Have you moved your headquarters from the North Shore?”

That would have made news. Kingston Surfing had been around for decades. Relocating their headquarters would have sent shockwaves through Hawai’i and the entire surfing world.

“He’s not at work. He’s at home.”

He frowned, and then it hit him. “He took off this week for the wedding. I didn’t even think about that.”

“He hasn’t been working full-time for close to six months.”

Then she bit her lip. As if she revealed some big secret. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been studying her so closely. “What?”

She sighed again. “I don’t want to gossip about Ben.”

---