Laguna Beach: That Gold in Laguna (Kindle Worlds Novella) (A Charisma Series Novella, The Ericksons Book 2)

by Heather Hiestand

  Text copyright ©2016 by the Author.

  This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Real You, LLC. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Laguna Beach remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Real You, LLC, or their affiliates or licensors.

  For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

  THAT GOLD IN LAGUNA

  A Kindle Worlds Novella

  Based on Kaira Rouda’s Laguna Beach Series

  A Charisma Series Novella

  The Ericksons, Book Two

  Written by

  Heather Hiestand

  www.heatherhiestand.com

  Amazon Author Page | Newsletter

  Table of Contents

  Dear Readers

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Laguna Beach

  Acknowledgments

  More From Heather Hiestand

  About the Author

  Dear Readers!

  Welcome to the Laguna Beach Kindle World! Billionaires. Beaches. Television and movie stars. Business tycoons!

  I’m so glad you are here and diving into this wonderful book. All of the Laguna Beach Kindle World stories are set in the same town of Laguna Beach, where my original series takes place. If you’re familiar with the series, you’ll no doubt run across some of your favorite characters. The difference is, this book is entirely the work of the author. I didn’t help with plotting, writing or editing, but I was thrilled that when I asked her, she agreed to bring her imagination and storytelling skills to Laguna Beach!

  The Laguna Beach Series is set in the popular seaside resort town in Southern California, home to wealth and privilege and the first reality TV show. Ten years later, where are the cast members now? Meet Madison and Josh, Annie and Hank, Paul and Laura, Jamie and Scott as they fall in love.

  And now, with the Laguna Beach Kindle World, meet their friends and enjoy more love stories! It’s always happily ever after at the beach! Happy reading. For more about Laguna Beach, stop by my website: www.KairaRouda.com

  Enjoy your time at the beach!

  xo

  Kaira

  Chapter One

  Thor Erickson saw the rich girl hair first. Like that royal princess, she had glossy, sable waves cascading over her prim, lightweight navy shift dress. Was the beauty walking into the Laguna Beach Mondrian’s conference room behind Richard McHughes his daughter or his mistress? Thor knew she wasn’t his wife. When she smiled at the group around the table he pegged her. Daughter. He’d seen the same smile she offered the group cross McHughes’ face when he’d seen the bandit gold their treasure hunting team had found on his land.

  When he checked her feet he saw what he expected, matching blue pumps with a stiletto heel. Something to wear to lunch at The Ivy in Los Angeles, famed for celebrity sightings. He didn’t have to look under the table to see what his brother’s girlfriend, Jenny Craft, was wearing on her feet. Flip flops, like a normal person in Laguna Beach’s hot late July. Rachel McHughes was one high-end princess type with the perfect, sleekly designed body to match.

  “Everyone is here,” his brother Crowe, the leader of the California Gold television show team said, rising from his seat at the foot of the table. “We’re here today to discuss what’s happening with the second half of our first season. We have three episodes to fill.”

  McHughes sat at the opposite end of the table, his Kenyan safari tan still evident. He’d interrupted his trip in June to see the gold cache they’d found in his private caves off Thousand Steps Beach, but then had gone back for a month. Everyone had been travelling. Thor had been to New York and Los Angeles. He’d returned to teammate Justin Hatch’s little house in the Laguna Woods neighborhood just the night before.

  “I think the answer is obvious, Crowe,” McHughes said. “Keep working on my property.”

  McHughes’ princess hadn’t seated herself at the table, but on a chair off to the side. Crowe was still standing.

  “Let’s do introductions before we get into the discussion,” Thor said from his position at Crowe’s left side. He wanted to know who the mystery woman was for certain. They were talking about treasure. He didn’t like the idea of outsiders knowing their business.

  McHughes’ glance held cool disdain. “Everyone here is known to me.”

  “Who is your companion?” Thor asked.

  McHughes’ gaze went up to the ceiling for a moment, as if he was asking for deliverance from an idiot. “My daughter.”

  “Does she have a name?” Crowe asked in a cheery manner.

  “I’m Rachel,” the woman said. She tossed her hair.

  At least she’d spoken for herself. Thor liked the husky tone of her voice. He even appreciated her looks, even though they screamed hands off.

  Roger Dalton, their producer, introduced the three flunkies who were seated next to Rachel McHughes on the room’s outskirt. They all had that wish-it-was-still-Sunday groggy look in their eyes.

  “Excellent, thank you,” Crowe said, looking down at his notes like the academic he someday wanted to be when he hung up his treasure hunting equipment. “I have to tell you, Richard, that our research indicates we found the entire Sanchez cache. There could be more in that cave, but we accounted for all of the stolen coins as well as the murdered henchman.”

  When they’d returned to the cave to check the bandit markings on the walls, they’d dug in the floor below the second set of markings and found a skeleton. Luckily, they’d involved the police from the moment they’d found the gold cache and they were on hand to perform the proper protocols for the skeleton.

  “What else might be there?” Jenny, their resident skeptic, asked. She’d been a reality TV star on the breakout MTV hit show Laguna Nights for five years, before another decade spent quietly managing her Laguna Gold Pizza restaurant. Now she was part of their team, and his brother’s girlfriend. Thor only had a bedroom to call his own in the area because Crowe had recently moved in with Jenny.

  “We know the cave continues under the cliff,” Crowe said.

  “A grown man can’t fit into the opening we found,” Thor pointed out. He reached for the carafe of coffee and poured half a cup. The leaking carafe dribbled onto his fingers. Hoping the cameras weren’t focused on him, and that he hadn’t caught his white T-shirt in the spray, he wiped the liquid onto his jeans.

  “Not one like you, who is six and a half feet tall.” Justin smirked at Thor’s fumbling with the coffee. He pushed his cup over so Thor could refill it. “But men were smaller in the eighteen fifties.”

  “Not that much smaller,” Crowe said. “It’s unlikely there is much there.”

  “Still, it’s worth checking into.” Jenny pushed the carafe from her end of the table down to Thor when the last of the coffee dribbled into Justin’s quarter-filled cup. “It keeps us moving forward without fighting the summer heat.”

  Justin nodded his thanks when Thor pushed over his freshly filled cup. “Yes, but without much hope of finding anything.” Justin was the youngest of the group at twenty-five, and his hair was bleached blond by the sun he loved to surf in. “Let’s explore the private land by the Laguna Beach Wilderness Park. My research in Be
rkeley gave us an "X" to mark the spot.”

  “That is worth an entire season, not three episodes,” Beau Erickson, Thor and Crowe’s father, said. A lifelong gold hunter himself, not to mention a reality TV veteran, he’d been brought onto the team at their producer’s insistence. Thor and his older brother, Viking, took after their father, with their Scandinavian looks, while Crowe and their sister took after their late mother, with her Black Irish hair and features.

  “Aren’t you itching to dig something up though? We’ve got Thor to run the heavy equipment, now that he doesn’t have to play cameraman.” Justin put his hands on an imaginary set of excavator controls.

  “Don’t blow the park on three episodes. When California Gold debuts in the fall, you’re going to renew for a bigger second season. That’s the time for a big dig.” Dalton adjusted his orange-framed glasses more securely on his nose.

  “My family has invested a lot of money in the show,” said Josh Welsh, a friend of Crowe’s whose family owned a venture capital company. “I’d like to see some more gold.”

  “We found approximately one point five million dollars’ worth of gold coins on our first try,” Thor said, dead-pan. “Isn’t that enough to make your family happy?”

  Josh shrugged. “Could have been luck. If not for that earthquake who knows if you’d have found any more than that penny you turned up.”

  “Let’s give it another go on my land,” McHughes said. “My family has owned the property since nineteen twenty-eight when the house was first built. That means no one has ever run a metal detector on my land. We’ve kept people out of the caves. I’ll pay for the hole to the next cave to be widened so that your team can get through.”

  “Have we consulted with geologists to see what kind of cave system might be under there?” Dalton drummed his hands on the table. “Or run sonar?”

  Rachel McHughes opened a hard-backed notebook with a snap and made notes. “I can have that done.”

  “No,” Crowe said. “That’s the kind of thing our team needs to do, on camera.”

  “And we don’t have another opening on the team,” the producer said with a warning glance at McHughes. “Not for season one.”

  “Just trying to save you a few bucks,” McHughes said.

  “It will cost us the show if we miss filming important moments,” Dalton said. “But thank you. Crowe, can you get that done?”

  “I’ll take it on.” Beau wrote a note for himself on his legal pad. “The task is important but not sexy. Let the old guy handle it.”

  Thor chuckled. He still remembered their late mother teasing Beau when he’d been featured on the front cover of a sportsmen’s magazine with the banner, “The New Indiana Jones: The Sexiest Treasure Hunter Alive.” His father might be fifty-five and gray-haired now, but he was still lean and attractive. He wondered at the cost of Beau’s remaining faithful to his late wife’s memory. It had been six years since she’d lost her battle with cancer.

  “It’s going to take time to get those two things done,” Crowe said. “I say we survey the Wilderness Park adjacent area. We can set us up for next season, right Roger? Especially if we have a small find, like another coin.”

  “What do you think is there again?” Dalton asked. “We could pre-can the footage for season two.”

  Justin pushed his bleached bangs out of his eyes and opened the manila folder in front of him. “Bullet Malone’s treasure,” he said. “According to documents I found at the Bradford Library, he operated out of a homestead on the land. His girlfriend lived there. He was killed in a gun battle in Arizona when he was twenty-four. It’s believed that the proceeds from three bank robberies in the eighteen-eighties are buried on that land around the farmhouse.”

  “And you know exactly where that was?” Dalton asked.

  Crowe grinned. “Indeed we do. X marks the spot.”

  “I think that’s good enough,” Dalton said. “Let’s find the farmhouse, dig up what’s left, then film that. The season can end with planning the hunt for the bank robbery gold. We’ll cut in what Beau is finding too, just in case there really are more decent-sized caves on the McHughes property.” He chose a Danish from the plate at the center of the table.

  “I have more caves,” McHughes said. “But it will require a lot of money to get into them between the small entrances and the water table.”

  A knock came on the outer door and Josh’s girlfriend, Madison, who worked at the Mondrian hotel and had let them use the meeting space, poked her head in. “Time’s up, guys,” she called. “The next group scheduled to be in here starts in five minutes.”

  “We have our marching orders,” Crowe said, standing up. He wasn’t as tall as the other men in his family, but he still easily held the attention of the room. “Thanks everyone.”

  Thor saw the irritation in the clenched jaw of Richard McHughes. His daughter watched him carefully, but didn’t stand until her father did.

  Justin punched Thor’s arm, distracting him from eying the rich girl. “We’re gonna dig!” he said exuberantly. “How much fun is that gonna be?”

  “In late July?” Thor asked, forcing the feral grin that seemed to be called for to his mouth. “Let’s do a much better job hauling in drinking water than we did for our work in the cave, okay, buddy?”

  Thor was at the Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Laguna Hills Plaza Shopping Center on Tuesday, stocking up on canvas work pants for their team, when he heard the angry click clack of high-heeled shoes behind him. He turned around to see Rachel McHughes of all people. Glossy hair swung around the shoulders of another little shift dress, this one a pale yellow. More three-inch heeled shoes.

  Jenny had told them a little about her. Twenty-nine, a minor role for one season in Laguna Nights, the reality TV show that filmed locally, during her junior year of high school. Had to be a story there, why she hadn’t returned to the show for her senior year. Maybe Daddy hadn’t liked it.

  “What a coincidence. Just the person I wanted to talk to,” she said. “Is Crowe here?”

  “Am I the person you wanted to talk to, or is he?” Thor asked, moving his shopping cart out of the walkway so that a dusty construction worker could get by.

  “You’ll do.” She glanced up, narrowed eyes giving away her irritation. Her eyebrows were wispy. He could see where she’d penciled them in, but the rest of her face was princess-perfect. Smooth skin, button nose, strong jaw. How much makeup did it take to make those cheeks just the right hint of pink, those lips so soft and rosy?

  “This doesn’t seem like a place where you would shop,” he said, as she stopped in front of him and set her handbag at her feet.

  “They have a pro shop. My father needed some things.”

  “Ah.” He thought about crossing his arms, but tucked them into the pockets of his jeans instead. Since he loomed over her petite frame, just standing there could come off as hostile. Sometimes he intimidated people without meaning to.

  “A friend of mine owns one of the franchise stores in the parking lot,” she added. “I thought I’d take her to lunch.”

  “I’m filling our shopping list for our next expedition,” he said, deciding to be friendly. “The cave took a toll on our wardrobes.”

  “Invest in some high-tech fabrics,” she advised. “You’ll want to stay as cool as possible at this time of the year.”

  He’d stick with cheap, easy to discard T-shirts, for the sake of the cost. He wasn’t made of money, not yet at least. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

  Her chest rose and fell. He could feel her gearing up for something.

  “Why did you blow my father off yesterday? He wants you to keep working on our property.”

  There it was. But he could handle this reasonably enough. Apparently Princess Rachel hadn’t been listening at the meeting.

  “First of all, my father is going to do the research, so we didn’t ignore your father at all. Secondly, we always had two targets, and Justin’s research tightened our search location even mor
e. Besides, we have permission to search at the other location. The owner is elderly and if he dies, we’d lose our shot, maybe forever.”

  “The thing is, I know there is more gold on our property,” she said. “That’s easier than some dusty summer dig out in the open.”

  “Treasure hunting isn’t supposed to be easy. We are on television. We ought to give the viewers at least some sweat and effort.” He let a smile play across his lips.

  Now she was the one crossing her arms. He wondered if she’d had her nose done, it was painfully adorable. “Why are you so certain?”

  “I found a gold coin when I was twelve.”

  His first reaction was an involuntary eyebrow lift. Then he wished he had a camera ready. This moment would have been great on camera. His voice sharpened. “What kind of coin?”

  “Spanish, I think. It was really old.”

  He scratched his jaw. “Sounds like a collector’s piece.”

  “Not necessarily. California was Spanish.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  She spoke with her hands. “I was really interested in gardening as a pre-teen. I helped the gardener dig a really deep hole in the front for a bush.”

  “How deep was the coin?”

  “Like four feet.”

  “We can run a metal detector around your garden beds, but it isn’t going to pick up anything that deep,” he said. “Have you done any research on the property? Were the Spanish really there?”

  “The house was built in nineteen twenty-eight,” she said promptly. “It’s always been in our family.”

  “No earlier homesteads?”

  He knew her house was one of the originals on the cliff. The land had been sectioned over the years, more houses built, but they hadn’t dug any deeper into the property history. Crowe had followed Sanchez’s robbery to the McHugheses, not the McHugheses to the Sanchez robbery.