"
@elonmusk seemed quite shy and slightly awkward," Talulah says.
"He was talking about rockets, and at first I didn’t realize they were his rockets."
At one point he asked, "May I put my hand on your knee?" She was a bit taken aback, but nodded her assent.
At the end, he said to her, "I’m very bad at this, but please may I have your phone number because I would like to see you again."
"We ended up having breakfast together," Riley says, "and at the end he said, ‘I’d really like to see you for lunch.’
And then after lunch that day, he said, ‘Well, that was really wonderful. Now I’d like to see you for dinner.’ "
Over the next three days, they had almost every meal together and went shopping at Hamleys toy store to get gifts for his five kids.
"They were love birds, holding hands the entire time," Lee says.
At the end of the trip, he invited her to fly back to Los Angeles with him. She couldn’t, because she had to go to Sicily for a photo shoot for a Tatler article about a movie she had just made, St. Trinian’s. But from there she flew to Los Angeles. Rather than moving in with Musk—which she believed was improper—she took a room for a week at the Peninsula Hotel.
At the end of the visit, he proposed.
"I’m really sorry I don’t have a ring," he said. She suggested they shake hands on it, which they did.
"I remember swimming around with him in the rooftop pool, very giddy, talking about how strange it was that we had known each other for about two weeks and were now engaged." Riley said she felt sure things would work out.
"What’s the worst that could happen to us?" she joked.
Musk, suddenly in earnest mode, replied, "One of us could die."
Somehow, in the moment, she found that very romantic.