Frisky Business by Clodagh Murphy Page B

table, you would win. The only losers were those who were too afraid to put their chips down. ‘You can’t lose,’ everyone had told her. Sometimes she had thought they were right. She knew there had been times when she could have made more money, and she had turned her back on some potentially lucrative opportunities, but she had never regretted it because she had always known her limits. There was only a certain level of debt that she could cope with, and she was not prepared to go beyond that. She preferred to sleep at night.
    ‘And what about now?’ Kit broke into her thoughts.
    ‘I’m okay. I own this house, I have no mortgage.’ She sighed. ‘I’m lucky. I can ride it out, live on rental income until things pick up again. But I’m not doing any new projects because the market’s so bad. It’s just not worth it.’
    ‘Iknow things are bad, and it would be hard to get a return on your investment. But the thing is, I own this house outright. So it would only cost whatever it would take to renovate it – after that, the rest would be pure profit.’
    ‘If you managed to sell it.’
    Kit’s face fell a little at this, but she knew she had to be brutally honest. There was no point in giving him unrealistic hopes.
    ‘Well, yeah – that’s why I need your advice. It does need a hell of a lot of work. I still have some savings, but I have no idea if I can afford to do it – or even if it’d be worth doing. I might end up spending more than I could possibly get for it.’
    ‘How bad is it exactly?’
    ‘Well, I haven’t been down there in years – not since we were kids and Aunt Lillian lived there, and it wasn’t great even then. I have a photo,’ he said, pulling it from the papers and pushing it across the table to her along with the estate agent’s details.
    ‘It looks pretty neglected,’ Romy said, staring down at the photo.
    ‘Yeah, and that was taken about eight years ago, so it’s probably a lot worse now. It’s been empty since Aunt Lillian died.’
    ‘Well, on the surface it looks like a classic money pit and my instinct would be to tell you to stay well away from it. But it’s hard to tell much from a photo. I’d need to see it in person to properly assess what kind of condition it’s in and what sort of money you’d need to spend.’
    ‘Would you do that?’ Kit said, brightening. ‘Come down and have a look at it?’
    ‘Sure.’ What had she got to lose? She loved looking around houses, imagining what she could do with them. She already knew from what Kit had told her about the house and what sheknew of the current market that her instinct to advise him not to touch it was unlikely to change. But there was no harm in looking – and she could at least give him a realistic assessment of what it would cost to renovate, so he could make his own decision. It was a beautiful house, though … ‘Where is it?’
    ‘In Wicklow. A stunning location in the arsehole of nowhere,’ he said, laughing wryly.
    ‘It’s big, isn’t it?’ she said thoughtfully, looking at the spec.
    ‘Huge.’
    ‘And it’s got a lot of land around it, which is a good thing.’
    ‘If you did think it was worth doing, would you be able to … help?’
    Here it comes, she thought. ‘Help how?’
    ‘I’m completely clueless about developing. I don’t even know where to start. And it’d be so obvious I didn’t know what I was doing, I’d probably get fleeced. Plus you’d have all the contacts with builders and so on. I thought maybe you could project manage it for me.’
    ‘I don’t know, Kit—’
    ‘You said you don’t have any projects on the go at the moment.’
    ‘I don’t, but—’
    ‘And I can’t imagine being a landlady takes up a lot of your time.’
    ‘No, it doesn’t.’ That was an understatement. She was so bored of sitting on her arse collecting rent. She really missed developing.
    ‘Well, think about it anyway,’ Kit said. ‘And factor in your fees when you’re