Princess Beatrice and millionaire boyfriend to marry within months of moving in together at St James’ Palace
PRINCESS Beatrice and her multi-millionaire boyfriend are to marry within months after moving in together at St James’s Palace.
The Duke and Duchess of York’s daughter is said to be “head over heels in love” with property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, and friends claim they will soon be heading up the aisle.
“They are incredibly happy and already planning the wedding” one close pal told The Sun on Sunday last night.
“Edo has moved in with Beatrice at her apartment in St James’s Palace and spends most of his time there.
“They can hardly keep their hands off each other and spend every moment they can together.
“I don’t know if he has actually got down on one knee with a ring yet but they are openly talking about marriage and it will either be later this year or possibly early in 2020.
“I know her parents are delighted and the Duchess is already thinking about her wedding day outfit!”
The Sun on Sunday first revealed the couple’s romance last November after they had been dating for five weeks.
Last weekend Edo, 35, and Beatrice, 30, joined her parents Andy and Fergie at the Bahrain Grand Prix and were put up by the Crown Prince in a luxurious suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
They were recently spotted strolling arm in arm in New York.
And at the beginning of the year they were photographed on holiday in Kenya, enjoying the tranquil island of Lamu where his family have a coastal estate.
Beatrice, who has not dated anyone else since splitting up from her boyfriend of ten years, American Dave Clark in 2016, met Edo at her sister Eugenie’s wedding last October.
Edo has been a family friend of the Yorks for years and when his stepfather Christopher Shale - a close friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron - died in 2011, Andy, Sarah, Bea and Eugenie all went to the funeral.
Bea and Edo began their romance even though he was still sharing his London home with Chinese-American architect Dara Huang and their two year-old son Christopher ‘Wolfie’ Woolf.
The news Edo was seeing Bea shook her family and her father Po-Tien, a retired scientist with US space agency NASA, said : Why would they want to go and break this up?
“I can’t understand it. It’s not fair but the royal family are so powerful.
“What can I do?”
Ironically it was on Lamu that Edo holidayed in 2015 with Dara and proposed to her, although they did not marry.
Descended from Italian nobility, Edo is a Count whose father Alex was an Olympic skier in the early 1970s.
His mother Nicola married Shale, a British businessman and Tory politician, but he was found dead in a toilet at the Glastonbury Festival in 2011.
The friend added : “Bea and Edo were keen to keep their romance under wraps at first because of the situation with his son and relationship with Dara.
“But now they are just happy for everything to be out in the open.
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“They don’t want to hide their love and just adore each other.
“The fact that he is living at St James’s Palace shows the depth of their relationship and that he has been given the royal seal of approval!
“It will be interesting to see if they want a big wedding at Windsor Castle like Eugenie or something more low key.”
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