Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) routing is a very challenging task because of the dynamic nature of the network. The linking of provisional communication assures based on the infrastructure of MANET, however, there is no centralised monitoring process for making the routing in MANETs in terms of trust and security. Therefore, the stability routing is not considered, which may break easily in dynamic MANETs. Thus, this paper introduces a trust-based secure routing protocol using the proposed atom whale optimisation algorithm (AWOA), which is the trust-aware routing protocol. The developed atom whale optimisation is utilised to select the optimal route with respect to the trust factors, like average encounter rate (AER), and successful cooperation frequency (SCF), integrity factor, and the forwarding rate. Moreover, secure routing is performed between the nodes using the proposed AWOA. The AWOA is the integration of atom search optimisation (ASO), and whale optimisation algorithm (WOA) that inherits the faster global convergence. The fitness function is newly modelled considering mobility, and trust factors. The proposed AWOA outperformed other methods with a minimal end-to-end delay of 0.0083 sec, maximal packet delivery ratio (PDR) of 97.73%, and the maximal throughput of 85.05% respectively.