Sinners are Winners (KPD Motorcycle Patrol 5)

“You,” he said, face neutral.

I swallowed hard.

“Me?”

“The career ruiner,” he said.

I deflated.

“I ruined my own career if it’s any consolation to you,” I admitted. “I had two interviews lined up for the next week, and both had watched me punch my date in the nuts. They expressed their sincere apologies, but they couldn’t condone that type of behavior, and told me only after I showed up that I wasn’t a good fit for their company.”

He opened his door wide and reached for the box that was at my feet.

“Come in,” he said.

Then he turned on his heel with my box and walked away.

Biting my lip, I walked carefully into Lock’s house and closed the door softly behind me.

Then I stared in awed silence.

The outside of the house definitely didn’t match the inside—and I say that in a good way.

The outside was rather boring and unassuming.

But the inside was just…magnificent.

It was all one big room.

Everything.

The kitchen ran into the living room that ran into the bedroom.

There was a corner of the house that had a laundry room set up, and even beyond that, there was a shower and a bathroom.

There was a single bump-out that I assumed was the toilet…and that was it.

Holy shit.

“Umm,” I said. “You have no walls.”

He looked around as he put my big box on the ground next to his state-of-the-art kitchen.

“When I was remodeling,” he said. “Quite a few of the walls needed to be repaired because whoever owned the place before me didn’t give a fuck. There were holes in every wall. Some of the studs were cracked. Hell, there was so much damage to the walls that it looked like they’d tried to take them all out with a sledgehammer.”

“So you just decided to say fuck the walls and take them all down?” I asked.

I mean, he’d done a good job. Honestly, it looked like a loft apartment in a house. It was cool.

“Yeah,” Lock said. “I thought about trying to fix them, but I just put up beams instead. Saved me about thirty thousand bucks in the end. And since I live alone, and the house is too freakin’ small to be anything but a bachelor’s pad, I didn’t see anything wrong with it.”

I didn’t either.

“I like it,” I said. “The kitchen is beautiful.”

Lock looked at his kitchen proudly.

“I went to IKEA thanks to a fuckin’ friend who said it was ‘easy as hell,’” he said. “At first, I got a couple of quotes from the local places. Lowes. Home Depot. A couple of private contractors. And it was all fifteen grand or more.” He grimaced. “And on a new cop’s budget, that wasn’t going to cut it. I needed cheap. I’d already sort of gone over on the rest of the house. Then I decided to give IKEA a go. My mom said that she’d heard a lot of good things about it, how easy it was.”

He started to laugh, and my brows rose.

“What?” I asked.

“I get there, driving all the way to fuckin’ Dallas with this big red farm trailer of my dad’s. Pull up, go inside, plan out this fucking kitchen. Pay for it.” He shook his head. “And as we’re leaving, my saleslady chick that’s been helping me the entire time says, ‘Oh, make sure you check to make sure all your stuff is there. Sometimes they forget to give it all to you.’” He rolled his neck out. “Well, I get out there, bring my trailer around, and then all this shit is brought out. Box after box after box. Five team members in total come out. Drop all of this shit at the end of my trailer and leave.”

My mouth dropped open.

“It was all in boxes?” I asked. “I’ve heard some things about IKEA that were similar to that. Mostly just having to put stuff together and all…but even the cabinets were in boxes?”

Lock nodded.

“Even the cabinets,” he confirmed. “Each cabinet was in a box. Each cabinet door. Each pull. Each shelf. Each drawer. Then there were the hinges that came in about a million plastic bags. The fridge and the microwave were even in a box.”

“How many boxes was it total?” I asked.

He pulled out his phone and then started to flip through his pictures, not stopping until he was almost directly in front of me.

Turning the phone around, I gasped at what I saw.

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “That’s a lot of boxes.”

The entire expanse of his trailer was filled.

“That’s an eight-by-twelve trailer in case you’re wondering,” he said. “And the boxes totaled out at one hundred and ninety-three boxes. That’s not including door hinges.”

I shook my head. “Did you make sure that you had everything?”

He shook his head.

“I started to make sure that I had it all, but the lady that was told to stay and help in case I needed anything said they’d already checked and rechecked the list three times.” He paused. “And, just FYI, they didn’t have everything. I was missing two cabinet doors that they refused to give me because ‘I should’ve checked before I left the premises.’”