“Thirty minutes,” responded his wife, as calm as a Sunday morning.
“You’re sure?”
“It’s only a pipe. No one keeps a hotel from opening because of a gasket.”
Rafael finished tightening the gasket and slid from beneath the sink. “I’m not taking any chances. This time we’re going to do things the right way.”
“By the book,” said his wife, as if reciting a family rule. Her name was Delphine—a French name for an English rose, he liked to say. Delphine was thirty-four years old, lean and blond, an intelligent beauty, and holder of a First in economics from Cambridge.
“By the book,” said Rafael, sealing his declaration with a kiss to his wife’s lips.
Rafael Andrés Henrique de Bourbon—“Rafa” to anyone who’d known him long enough to share a beer—was six years his wife’s senior, a tall, rangy Spaniard with cropped black hair, eyes that glittered like obsidian, and a trimmed beard he’d borrowed from Satan himself. In fact, “devilish” was an adjective often connected with his name, for better or worse. Stretching, he toweled the sweat from a torso covered with tattoos. There was a Madonna and child he’d gotten after a night of carousing in Rome. A Maori war band around his left arm he’d gotten in Christchurch. And a Russian Orthodox crucifix on his back he couldn’t remember where he’d gotten, or why. There were sixteen in all, and he was eager to find a reason to add another.
“Watch out, darling,” he said as he freed the cleaning nozzle. A torrent of pressurized water shot into the sink, spraying them both. Rafa shouted with joy. “Strong enough to strip a barnacle from a ship’s hull. The Villa Delphine will have the cleanest plates on the island.”
He switched off the water and replaced the nozzle in its holder. “Time to shower. A filthy hotel owner does not make a good impression.”
“Stop,” said Delphine, taking his hands in her own. “I want to tell you something.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No,” she said, giving his hands a tug. “It cannot.”
Rafa stepped closer, looking into her clear blue eyes, amazed as always that a woman as beautiful, educated, kind, and selfless had decided to marry a man like him. A man far from beautiful, hardly educated, kind when it suited him, and selfless never. “Sí, mi amor.”
“I want you to know how proud I am of you.”
“For screwing up so many times?”
“For never giving up.”
Sincerity. Was anything more painful to a Castilian? “Please.”
Another tug to remind him who was boss. “I know things haven’t gone as smoothly as we would have liked since we left Geneva.”
“Smoothly? No, they have not gone smoothly.”
“I want you to know, it’s all right,” said Delphine. “I never expected you to be perfect. What I love about you…maybe the reason I married you…is because you never give up. Never. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you not get back on your feet. It’s who you are. These past years, sure we’ve made a few mistakes.”
“I’ve made a few—”
“We’ve made a few. But look at what you’ve built here. It’s magnificent. None of that matters anymore. Right now, right here, I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long, long while.” She put his hands to her lips. “Thank you for not giving up.”
Rafa took his wife in his arms and held her to him. After a moment, he put his mouth to her ear and whispered, “Sweetheart, may I ask you something?”
“Of course, my darling,” she said, head to his chest. “Anything.”
“How long until they get here?”
The Villa Delphine was indeed magnificent. Built on the last open plot of land atop the hill separating the island’s two beaches, the hotel was a masterpiece of whitewashed concrete and limestone offering thirty guest suites, a dining room overseen by a Michelin-starred chef, a spa, two swimming pools, and the island’s only tennis court.
It was Rafa’s first foray as a hotelier, but not as an entrepreneur. Since fleeing Europe, he had opened a Mexican restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, a chain of tanning salons in Singapore, and a spin studio in Jakarta. Each had launched amid a flurry of great expectation and high hopes only to quickly and spectacularly crash. If his current maxim was “By the book,” formerly it was “Cut every corner” and “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Time, experience, and the demise of his personal finances had dictated a change in ethos. The Villa Delphine was Rafael de Bourbon’s last stand.