Page 3 of Surge

Chapter One

"This is Brittany Aspen coming to you live, fifty miles off the Monterey coast, where last night an oil well explosion shook the biggest oil platform in the world. At this hour, we are being told that the explosion cracked the sea floor and engineers are concerned other wells may soon follow. It's unclear at this hour if oil has spilled into the Pacific. We will keep you updated as this story unfolds."

Silent observers.

We were the ones that sat back, soaked in the information, and stayed out of trouble and drama.

I'd always been an observer in school and in life. Quietly doing my job of being an honor student and staying out of the way of those that make school hell. It was enough of a task to keep up with the ins and outs of social hierarchy, without being stuck in the middle of juicy gossip.

It wasn't worth the time and effort to stay on a gilded pedestal when high school was such a short blip in the grand scheme of things. Four years came and four years went. If I lived to be one-hundred, it was merely four percent of my time on Earth.

Yet somehow, a simple book documenting the high school experience had almost a hundred-percent buy rate and took permanent residence on shelves. There was something powerful about producing a yearbook that would be looked at for decades.

"What are you looking at?" I was snapped out of my thoughts by a voice dripping in honey. There was a flutter in my stomach and my neck heated.

I knew exactly who it was without even looking up. But I wanted to look up because Jax West was the most attractive man at Salinity Cove High School. He was definitely a man and not a boy.

My eyes traveled up his long, muscular legs to his narrow waist and broad shoulders. I squinted and shielded my eyes to get a better view of his face.

I was all too familiar with Jax, but so was every other girl at school. Most of us drooled over him at a distance. He was one of the elite swimmers at school and was the captain of the swim team. With that came a chip on his shoulder that translated into broken hearts and midnight tears.

I had to admit, his asshole tendencies were muted by the angle of his jaw and hypnotic aqua eyes. He was hot, and he was talking to me for the first time. Now I understood how so many fell under his spell.

"Excuse me?" I fumbled with the brochures in my lap and squinted at him again. I was nothing if not smooth while talking to guys.

He sat down next to me, a smile playing on his lips. I opened my mouth to ask him why he was here in the first place, but closed it.

Don't make a fool of yourself, Riley.

He grabbed the top booklet. "Stanford?"

His proximity got the best of me, despite my best efforts. "What are you even doing here?" I snatched it back from him and he frowned, causing my stomach to twist. "Is there a swim camp going on?"

"I needed another elective, and last night, Mr. Garcia emailed me and invited me to this little planning sesh you had going."

Jax was going to be on the yearbook staff? He had to be kidding. I doubted he had the time to dedicate to creating a book people would look back on in twenty years and show their kids.

"You? On yearbook?" I was setting a really good first impression. "It takes a lot of time and commitment to publish. Usually only spring sport athletes can handle the time commitment."

"I need the elective. Mr. Garcia thinks it will be good to have an athlete of my caliber lend their expertise to the sports section." He took the rest of my college brochures and flipped through them. "Aren't you going to your father's alma mater?"

I had been worried all summer about my classmates knowing Robert Kline was my father. My fears had just been confirmed.

I looked across the quad and frowned. I should have been enjoying myself on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus, but instead, my mind kept wandering to the headlines over the past several weeks.

250 million gallons of oil spill into the Pacific.

Marine life at risk.

Robert Kline in hiding.

My father was a sore subject that I didn't want to talk about. I didn't even know the man, but the thought of being related to him made me want to vomit. He was a coward and a criminal who ran instead of dealing with the aftermath of what was being called the greatest oil disaster ever.

"I want to keep my options open." Our fingers touched as he held out the brochures. My fingers tingled, and he propped his leg up, draping an arm over it and staring at me.

I shifted on the grass and shoved the college brochures into my messenger bag. I'd gathered them at the beginning of summer when my best friends and I went on a road trip to visit campuses.

"Your skin reminds me of the sands of Waimanalo Bay." It was an odd thing for him to compare my skin to, but maybe this was why he had girls hanging all over him.

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