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individual?’
    He could swear she nearly smiled then. A slight twitch softened her mouth and drew his gaze to her full lips before he reluctantly forced himself to meet the eyes staring up at him. Was she flattered by this confession? Or did his eagerness just make matters worse?
    He gave what he hoped looked like a casual shrug. ‘I’m going to leave you to your floor sanding now, Harper Cassidy. I hope we meet again.’ He smiled into her eyes, loading as much animal magnetism into the gaze as he could muster, willing her to be attracted to him. Then he turned on his work-booted heel and thundered down the crumbling concrete steps. He resisted every screaming urge in his body to turn and take one last look before the door slammed behind him.
    In the space of one afternoon, she’d foiled all of his attempts to talk to her. The score read Harper–3, Luke–0. That in itself should’ve put him off, but for some twisted reason it had the opposite effect.
    He’d always liked a challenge, but few women ever gave him much of one. He’d had several relationships over the past ten years, none of which had amounted to anything serious. His blood hadn’t stirred for a long time at the sight of a woman. Until today. But Harper, it seemed, was no Jane Average. He’d never met anyone like her, so small and yet so packed full of sass, with all her hostility, her goals and her passions. He wanted to see more of her.
    And he wanted to help her. Despite her grit and determination she needed his help.
    And he needed to rack up some points on the scoreboard.

Chapter 4
    Deck building 101 progressed without too many battered fingers or thumbs. Harper stood at the front of the old community centre classroom, lit up by fluorescent tubes. The lights hummed, a soft background noise Harper only noticed when she was alone in the room. Right now her eclectic little group of four women—ranging in life experience from a twenty-four year-old law student to a sixty-seven-year-old retired librarian—made far too much noise.
    Laughs and encouragement rang out across the room as they mastered each skill and moved onto the next one. Building a deck seemed a rather ambitious project, but Harper knew from experience that broken down into steps it became more than doable. She trusted the women’s abilities to follow instructions enough that she planned to let them loose in her own backyard.
    It’d been a long day but instead of feeling tired Harper felt energised by the enthusiastic buzz as the class came to an end and they started packing up. She’d cast aside the despondency threatening to swamp her since Judy Champion’s phone call, buoyed by the reminder that every one of these women attended her class for a different reason yet they were unified in their desire to learn.
    As she listened to their chitchat, which shifted from Christmas cake recipes to comparing holiday plans for the summer, Harper stepped back to watch a small bug attracted by the bright light get zapped and fall to the floor, fried. She shuddered. That could’ve been her, if Luke Colton hadn’t caught her at the bottom of the ladder today. The man had his good points, even if subtlety wasn’t one of them. Unlike the bug, she wasn’t totally stuffed, but the holidays loomed long and dreary with work prospects low and no holiday plans. A quiet Christmas with Annie, followed by a quieter New Year. Even her wayward mother had better things to do and was off on a cruise in the Bahamas with her latest man. Harper couldn’t even afford a trip to the supermarket.
    And her quiet time of year hadn’t even started yet. Unless …
    She looked at the friendly faces of her students. From diverse backgrounds, with different opinions on every topic under the sun, consulting them was easily as good as conducting a random survey.
    â€˜Tell me,’ she said, clapping her hands like a preschool teacher to get