Tamara Ecclestone and her fiancé Jay Rutland have given a world exclusive interview to HELLO! Magazine in which they announce their engagement.The ecstatic couple tell the magazine all about their whirlwind romance –and how they started talking about marriage just a week after their first date.Heiress Tamara tells HELLO! she understands those who are skeptical about the engagement – but is so deeply in love with the 31-year-old former City stockbroker that she can ignore the doubters.
"Our engagement has been very sudden and I get that there are people who won't understand that and will read things into it," she says. "But my response to that would be, 'When you know, you know.'
"The thing is, I'd heard people say that before and I'd never really understood it, because I hadn't experienced it for myself. But when I met Jay, I just knew this was the man I was going to marry."
The couple were introduced by mutual friends in January and were together for a month when Jay proposed.
"I don't think the amount of time you are together has anything to do with it," Tamara says. "All I know is that I have never felt more comfortable with anyone so quickly, or felt as happy as I feel right now."
And she says that, when Jay proposed in Dubai earlier this month, she didn't hesitate to say yes. "The thing is, although this is going to sound crazy when I say it out loud, we'd already discussed the fact we wanted to get married, so even though it was a surprise when it happened, it wasn't a total shock.
"I've never been in a relationship before where I've been able to be myself and feel so comfortable so quickly. When you find true love, why wait?"
Jay also addresses newspaper reports which reveal that he was banned for insider trading and the alleged supply of drugs. He says he told Tamara about his past on their first date.
"I thought it was best to be upfront and honest with her from day dot, because I knew what we had was going to lead somewhere and that we had to have transparency," he reveals.
Tamara says his confession just made her admire him more. "Everyone has a past and the downside to my life is that the past gets dragged up. I feel protective of Jay and I don't ever want him to go through unnecessary anxiety because of his relationship with me. What I do know for sure about Jay is that he is a very good, loyal person and without trust, you have nothing."
To read more of the interview with Tamara and Jay, including details of his first meetings with her parents Bernie and Slavica, when they plan to get married and what Tamara's sister Petra thinks of the romance, pick up the latest issue of HELLO!