Technical Threat (Westin Force #4) - Julie Trettel Page 0,19

said. I gave her what I hoped was just a friendly smile and left to retrieve our bags.

Nonna was nowhere in sight. I didn’t think she could get into too much trouble in the lobby of a hotel, so I walked back out, moved the car to a parking spot and started pulling out our luggage, or rather Nonna’s. While I had one gym bag for the week, Nonna had five overflowing suitcases. I had no way of knowing what she actually needed. I knew that no matter which one I chose she would inevitably need something from one of the others, so I just grabbed them all.

I had three out when she ran out of the hotel and yelled across the parking lot. “Caleb, come quick. It’s an emergency!”

My body tightened on full alert. I threw the bags back into the trunk and slammed the door down as I turned and ran back to her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What? Nothing.”

“You said it was an emergency.”

“Oh, yes, come quick.”

She dragged me back into the hotel and over to a tall man with snow white hair sitting in the lobby. He was wearing a suit. His briefcase was propped up against his chair on the floor next to him and his computer was sitting on the table in front of him.

“Caleb, this is Walter Johnston. He’s recently widowed and lives in Sacramento. He’s in town on business.”

“Uh, okay. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Walter this is my grandson Caleb I was telling you about. He’s a computer genius. He’ll have you fixed right up.”

“Come again?” I asked.

“Walter is having trouble getting his computer to connect to the Wi-Fi. I assured him you know everything about computers and would have it working in no time.”

“Right. Okay. And that’s the emergency?”

“Of course. Didn’t I mention he’s here on business?”

I groaned, but sat down next to the man, feeling trapped and unable to do anything else, knowing Nonna wouldn’t stop until she was satisfied, I’d do the job and help the man.

“So, what’s going on?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure. It’s a new laptop and I can’t get my email to come up.”

I checked his settings. Everything looked fine.

“Have you been sending and receiving email since you got the laptop?”

“Yes. This is the first time I’ve had any problems.”

I ran a few more settings checks and everything looked fine. I went to run a ping trace and suddenly noticed he was connected to the hotel Wi-Fi, but he wasn’t getting any service. No one else was complaining about it so I had to reason it was just his laptop being affected.

I disconnected the network and then reconnected to the Wi-Fi. The internet popped up with the sign in screen.

“Mr. Johnston, is the room under your name? You need to put in that info and your room number again.”

“Again? I never saw this before.”

I held back my groan of irritation. “Well, sir, looks like that was your problem then. You should be good as new now.”

Before Nonna could drag me into something else, I walked back out to the car and retrieved our bags.

She met me in the lobby smiling proudly.

“Thank you for helping poor Walter. I told him you were a genius. You showed him. I just love watching you work.”

I scoffed. “That wasn’t me working, Nonna.”

The rest of the night passed by uneventfully and I was grateful for it. Nonna was a pistol, and I was already starting to rethink my decision to bring her. We had only managed about four hours of the drive on day one. I needed to find a way to distract her and just get up the road. We couldn’t afford all these diversions or stopping before sunset for the night. I appeased her one day, but I couldn’t let that happen again.

“You’re very quiet this morning. Did you not sleep well?” she asked me at breakfast.

I had wanted to just grab something off of the continental buffet the hotel provided, but she’d insisted on breakfast at Cracker Barrel.

“I’m fine,” I said. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her feelings.

“No, that’s a lie. What’s wrong?”

I sighed. “Here’s the deal. We have around nine hours left to get there. We shouldn’t have stopped so early last night. We’re having a good breakfast and then we have to drive. If we stop every hour it’s going to take a week just to get there.”

I didn’t want to tell her that I had picked up a rental car for the