This letter presents a pairwise key establishment scheme that is robust against the compromise of nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. Each node establishes local keys with its neighbor nodes that are at most three hops away at network boot-up time. When any two nodes establish a pairwise key, they receive the secret information from the nodes on the route between them, and construct the pairwise key using the secret information. Here, the local keys are utilized by the nodes on the route to send the secret information securely. The simulation results have proven that the proposed scheme provides better security than the key pre-distribution-based scheme.