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

by Heather Hiestand

  “But we know who owned the pieces,” McHughes said.

  “The insurance companies own them,” Thor said. “They paid out on the claims long ago.”

  “It’s still good television,” the assistant producer said, fingering the top of his button-down shirt, growing limp in the heat. “I can’t wait to do the reenactment. We’ll need the guest list, any descriptions of what people were wearing, and a look at the guest book from that era.”

  Her father closed the case and gestured the producer toward the house, ready to negotiate. The camera crew shut off their equipment. Confused, Rachel took off her necklace and handed it to Crowe so he could examine the coin.

  Thor approached her, like a god returning to earth. Time seemed to slow. She had to shake her head to reorient herself to reality.

  “I thought we were going to do a tour of the house?” she queried.

  “We’ll probably need to do some preplanning, so the camera crew knows what to shoot,” he told her. “We’re shooting a show here. It slows you down on the treasure hunting end of things, but it’s great to have the visual record.”

  “Not to mention you get famous,” Rachel said.

  Thor shrugged. “It’s part of the game. Doesn’t seem to have hurt my dad any, and I don’t see your father complaining either.”

  “No, my father’s doing a good job making this work for him,” she said. “He talked me into doing Laguna Nights too, back in the day.”

  “It’s exciting for people to share their family heritage,” Thor said. “But not everyone is into the spotlight. I don’t see your boyfriend here.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” Rachel said.

  “Lennon Lasky? That’s his name, right? That’s not what he told us yesterday.”

  She shook her head. “We broke up ages ago. He just hasn’t let me go yet.”

  “A work in progress?”

  “I’m not the one letting him in the house. He’s not welcome in mine, these days.”

  “You don’t live here?”

  “No, I have a condo.”

  The redhead walked up to Crowe and whispered in his ear. He turned to look at her, frowning. They spoke intensely for a couple of minutes, then she walked across the courtyard and got into one of the trucks and put it into reverse.

  “I take it she isn’t going on the tour,” Rachel said.

  Crowe walked over to them and handed the necklace to Thor. “Jenny wants to get back to work. She has two jobs.”

  “I feel like I hurt her feelings,” Rachel said. “She froze up when I mentioned the root beer incident.”

  “Maybe you could have saved it for off camera,” Crowe said, not smiling. “And her name is Jenny Craft, not Pizza Girl.” He spun on the heel of his hiking boot and stalked over to the assistant producer.

  “I messed up, huh,” Rachel said.

  “Why not apologize?” Thor suggested. “A show of humanity never hurts.” Then he walked away too, leaving Rachel with her mouth open, and the firm realization that none of the California Team really wanted to be at her family’s house, any more than her family did.

  She shaded her eyes with her hand, suddenly aware of it being noon, the sun shining directly overhead. Time to move into the shaded courtyard, and get the house tour over with. Until today, she’d always enjoyed her rare opportunities to do the tour, but now she felt uncomfortable, a show-off without merit.

  Rachel stewed on her shortcomings through the afternoon as she gave the assistant producer an on-camera full tour of the house and property. She became used to the boom mike above her head, though at first hint of black out of the corner of her eye made her feel like something was about to fall on her head. They made arrangements to bring everyone out again the next day. By the time the last of the crew left, she knew what she had to do. Apologize to Jenny Craft. Maybe order a pizza as a token of apology.

  She arrived at Laguna Gold Pizza just before six p.m. She hadn’t eaten at the restaurant since shooting Laguna Nights in high school. For one thing, she’d never liked pizza. It was too complicated for her palate, with all the ingredients and sauce and cheese all in one bite. She didn’t like much Italian food. Secondly, having to endlessly relive her white blouse being covered in sticky root beer, thereby exposing her lacy bra and the shape of her teenaged breasts and worse, her nipples, on camera, had not endeared the spot to her. Thank God no one had isolated those few seconds of film from the rest of the long ago episode and turned it into an internet meme. When she found a parking space in front of Delilah’s coin shop, she turned off the motor and leaned her head back. Maybe she didn’t want to apologize. That day was one of her most humiliating memories. It had been over a decade ago, though, she needed to get over it.

  She got out of her car and marched into the restaurant, letting the door swing closed with a rheumatic bang behind her. At the front desk, she said hello to a pretty blond employee in a sleeveless tee and a gold apron. “I’m hoping to see Jenny. I’m Rachel McHughes.”

  The young woman’s large brown eyes widened further, showing off her violet eyelash extensions. “Is this about the show?”

  “Yes, and also, can I order a salad to go?” she asked, as a waitress walked by carrying a tray with wooden bowls heaped with salad. Much better than pizza.

  “Of course. Which one?” She poised her pen over a white pad.

  “Ummm, the garden one?” Rachel said tentatively.

  “How about our veggie lover salad? What dressing?”

  “No dressing, that would be perfect, thank you.”

  She wrote up the ticket while Rachel read her name badge. Taylor. “I’ll pop it through the window and take you to Jenny. Just a moment.”

  Rachel nodded. “Thank you, Taylor.”

  A couple of minutes later, Taylor opened a door to a small dining room. More than a half dozen pairs of eyes stared up at them.

  “Oh, she’s in a meeting. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Rachel said.

  “I thought you were in the meeting,” Taylor said.

  “No, oh dear, I’m sorry.” As Rachel backed away under the onslaught of cool gazes, including Jenny’s, Thor rose to his feet.

  The man was magnificent. She almost expected him to pull a sword from a back scabbard and come at her screaming something in Old Norse.

  “What’s going on?” Thor asked, closing the door behind him. “I’ve got this, Taylor.”

  The waitress nodded. “Sorry about that. I’ll just get her salad.”

  “You come to a pizza place to order salad?” Thor asked quizzically.

  “I was just trying to be polite. I came here to apologize for my comments earlier,” she said in a formal tone.

  “So you weren’t trying to crash the meeting?” He smiled to show her he was kidding.

  She admired his perfect white teeth for a moment before refocusing. “No, of course not.” She glanced at the closed door. “I feel like every time I see any of you my words are misconstrued.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  She stared at him and remembered her threat to her father about dating him. All of the frustration of the week caught up with her. It made her daring, and she didn’t exactly what she wanted to do for once. “Would you like to come to my home for dinner tomorrow?” she asked. “We could clear the air. I don’t want to take time away from your meeting right now.”

  He tilted his head. “You want to cook me dinner?” He shook his head. “You mean, the team, right?”

  “No, just you. One at a time. I’ll do better that way.”

  “Then you should invite Jenny. She’s the one you insulted.”

  “She wouldn’t come.” Rachel felt like she was shriveling in front of him. “Look, I’m awkward. I get it. Only child syndrome. If you don’t want to, or if you think Delilah would object, I get it.”

  “Delilah? Why would she care? Because she’s Jenny’s sister?”

  “No, if you’re dating her.”

  “No,” Thor said with
a grimace. “No, we aren’t doing that.”

  “Oh, see, I got that wrong too.” She hid her pleasure. It didn’t matter.

  Crowe opened the door. “Thor, we need you.”

  He didn’t even look at her.

  “Hang on, bro, just a minute.”

  Crowe shut the door. Thor thrust out his palm. “Give me your address. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  She took out a pen and wrote her address on his palm. His fingers felt warm and rough beneath her own as she steadied her writing surface. “Six-thirty?”

  “Six-thirty,” he echoed. “Rachel McHughes, you have yourself a date.”

  Chapter Three

  Thor pulled up to Rachel’s gated condominium complex the next evening. A large rectangle of two story buildings clustered around an area with water features and a smaller one-story building. Two more cars pulled in behind him as he waited in front of the gate until the security guard realized he didn’t have a key card and waddled out of his booth, hiking up his cheap black pants.

  What the hell was he doing coming to dinner here? Was this business or something else? He had no idea what the end game was for the younger McHughes. They had nothing in common, except they both seemed to share the excitement of finding gold. Was the McHughes princess attracted to him?

  He gave the security guard his name. The man went back into his booth and the gate lifted. Thor drove through, circling the lot until he found an empty guest spot, thinking about the conversation he’d had with Crowe, Justin, and Jenny about this upcoming evening at their post-McHughes tour wrap up a couple of hours before back at Justin’s house.

  He’d told Jenny that Rachel had come to apologize the night before. She admitted she knew almost nothing about Rachel, for good or bad, despite overlapping on Laguna Nights for a season. Justin, younger by a few years, didn’t know anything much either, except that her stepmother was a former top model from the Kate Moss/Tyra Banks era.

  “Not in their league, of course,” Justin had said. “But still, a celebrity. I feel like I’ve heard she was involved in some massive catfights at local charitable events.”

  “So she’s an embarrassment?” Crowe asked.

  “With an awkward stepdaughter,” Jenny muttered. “And here I thought I was the awkward one. I thought the rich were taught social graces?”

  “Maybe she sort of grew up without a mother,” Thor said. “That wouldn’t help. Where is her mother? When did Richard remarry?”

  These thoughts whirled around in his head as he got out of his truck. He wasn’t sure why he even cared. Rachel had avoided talking to any of them during the tour today. She’d stayed on message like a professional tour guide, but then, she’d been coached by the producers the day before. On camera, she exuded confidence, but off, she’d stared at the oversized abstract art that dotted the house rather than the show team. She hadn’t tried to flirt with him, though he’d felt her gaze a time or two.

  He pulled a four-pack of local craft beer off of his passenger seat. Jenny had tried to talk him into bringing a bottle of wine to dinner instead but he refused. If he wasn’t willing to drink it, what was the point? He hadn’t dressed up, either, and had on his usual uniform of T-shirt and jeans. No point in confusing the situation, whatever it was.

  Her door was on the second level of her building, which squared off around a large courtyard with a blob-shaped pool and hot tub. The pool had a couple of families with kids dotted around it. The hot tub was empty at this time of night. He couldn’t help imagining her in it, the thought of her in her bikini warming his skin.

  Rachel opened the door within seconds of his knock. He lifted a hand in greeting as she toyed with the string tie around the waist of her white eyelet romper.

  She smiled tentatively and gestured him in, touching his forearm as he passed. “I hope my place was easy to find.” The small foyer was painted white, but the walls were covered by large paintings of female nudes in charcoal.

  “No trouble. That’s a lot of nipples,” he commented, feeling his arm tingle where she’d touched it.

  “My root beer phase,” she said, then paused, as if expecting him to laugh. When he didn’t she said, “Sorry, Laguna Nights joke.”

  “I never watched the show. That was Crowe’s thing.”

  “Oh, I see.” She nodded to herself.

  He wondered if he was supposed to have had a crush on her from the show. Was she the hot girl from her season or something? Jenny hadn’t said. “You drew all of this? Self-portraits?” He took a second look at the nipples.

  “I have a master’s in art. My thesis was Diverse Perspectives, the Nude in Twentieth Century Art.”

  “Okay.” He drew out the word.

  “Not self-portraits,” she assured him. “They are copies of famous nudes.” She pointed at one red-outlined woman on a bed. “That’s a copy I made of a Francis Bacon nude from 1963. The original is worth more than my father’s house, to give you some perspective.”

  “Important nudes. Got it.”

  Dimples indented her cheeks when she glanced at him. He hadn’t realized she had dimples. It took the hauteur out of her face when she smiled like that.

  “I just like to come home after a long day at my father’s house and remember I used to have my own interests. I wanted to do a coffee table book.”

  His gaze drifted past a portrait of a woman with bizarrely distended nipples. “Why didn’t you?”

  “That wouldn’t pay like my father does. My family has been collecting for a hundred years. I’m the curator. It’s a great job. We have lovely things, but I feel like I’m living in such a niche sometimes.” She gestured him through an archway, her usual high heels clicking on the tiles as she led him through.

  “How many bedrooms do you have?” he asked. He hadn’t seen much local real estate.

  “Three. I use one as an office.”

  He suspected she had more square footage in her condominium than Justin had in his entire house. Still, given the price of Laguna Beach real estate, Justin had been extremely lucky to inherit the cottage from his grandmother.

  Rachel’s place wasn’t any fancier than Jenny’s, even if it was larger and had a view of the ocean. Nothing like the grandeur of the McHughes cliff-side mansion.

  She gestured to a stark white sofa. He took one end and she perched on the other. “I really feel terrible for calling Jenny "pizza girl." I wanted you to know that.”

  He rested his arm on the back of the sofa, very glad he hadn’t been digging that day. Any stray streak of dirt would ruin this furniture. “If you ask me, the haves and have nots shouldn't matter. It’s been a decade since high school.”

  She glanced down and twisted the large diamond cocktail ring that she wore on her middle right finger. “It’s not that. It’s about the root beer incident, not that you would care. That’s why I remember her so clearly and resentfully.”

  “You are going to have to explain the root beer.” He searched her face for the vanished dimples.

  She took the ring off, then slid it back on her finger. The movement reminded him of a crass gesture people used for sex. He didn’t want to think about sex around Rachel McHughes, but between the nudes and the ring he was having trouble. Shifting his posture, he gave her his best “I’m listening” look.

  “I didn’t want to be on the TV show. That was my father’s desire. And when Jenny spilled cold soda all over my chest, the entire thing was captured on camera. They used a close up of my chest in the opening montage. I was so humiliated. It was ice cold root beer, Thor.”

  “I can imagine what it did,” he murmured, unable to stop himself from sneaking a peek at her chest. What were her nipples like? Rosy? Light, dark? Unfortunately, whatever they were, he was certain that he’d find them attractive.

  “I wanted to cut them off but was a little dramatic, even for a sixteen year old,” she muttered. “Instead, I started studying the art of the nude.”

  He patted her knee. “There you go. You made lemonade
out of lemons, or whatever the equivalent root beer terminology would be. Maybe Jenny did you a favor.”

  “Oh, please,” she said, with a toss of her head. Her hair fluffed out around her shoulders, giving him an unwelcome image of it spread across her pillow as she smiled alluringly at him.

  Her condo was the problem. It smelled like her, sort of arty and perfumed all at once. It was like being stuck in her head, which apparently was fixated on naked people.

  “So do you have pictures of naked men around here, too, or is only, err, lady pictures?”

  Her jaw dropped slightly. Cheeks pinked. She twisted her ring again. “Not much call for naked men pictures. Most famous artists are men.”

  “No Da Vinci?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” His brain felt empty. He couldn’t remember what happened to his beer. He said the first thing that came to his head. “Maybe you should stop living off your father. If your interests are really elsewhere.”

  “I work full-time,” she said. “I don’t slack.”

  “But you don’t like the work. I’m guessing you just like the money. Most people our age can’t afford condos that cost what, over a million dollars? No matter what their job is.”

  She stood. “It was a college graduation gift. Probably to get me to return to Laguna Beach.”

  “There you go. The real estate ball and chain. You’re my age, right? Twenty-nine? Time to figure out what you really want before you get stuck.”

  “I’ll go get the appetizers,” she muttered as she turned. She stalked off, leaving him with little more to do than stare at his own hands, the state of which had improved over the past month while he’d been hanging out in an editing suite instead of digging in a cave. He didn’t fit into this pristine white room, and all the naked girls were making him crazy.

  She came back with a white platter artistically filled with dainty sushi rolls. “Forgive me if I seem so out of touch with what you’re saying. There is such a clear contrast between you and my ex-boyfriend, Lennon. He's fine living off family money. And he doesn’t work nearly as hard as I do for it.”