Liz Hurley: Birthday girl

London, June 10 (PTI): As Liz Hurley celebrated her 40th birthday today, Valentina Pedroni, wife of Liz’s lover Arun Nayar, declared she had conquered her bitter feelings for the British model.

But Valentina said she still recalled vividly how her life was shattered when she realised her husband had left her for a woman she viewed as a friend.

The 35-year-old blonde is near the end of an acrimonious divorce battle with Nayar, the Mirror tabloid reported today.

“Now I have found my balance...I had lost it. I’ve got used to it. I open the papers now and when I see him with her, I don’t get upset any more.

“But the first time, I was so offended. We had only been apart 10 days and there they were all over the newspapers,” she said from her residence in Italy.

Valentina opened her heart on Nayar with whom she “fell madly in love” after they met at the Swiss ski resort of St Moritz in 1991. “He knows how to speak to a woman and how to be sweet. He was irresistible and I fell in love with him straight away.”

. We spoke non-stop for eight hours and that's how our story started,” she said.

After always keeping a respectable silence since details of liz and english-born arun emerged three years ago, she recalled how she had asked her husband to be more discreet instead of acting as one of india's richest, most famous and handsome bachelors.

Valentina also spoke of the couple's high-flying lifestyle in india for 12 years, explaining: “life is restricted to a group of 200 people at the most and we were part of that.

”I wasn't impressed by his money or his friends. I had my own. I was in love with arun and nothing else,” she said.

Valentina, who wed in 1997, said her divorce case is nearing its end in india after arun cited one reason as her ”mental torture” - a ploy created for the separation.

”In india, you can't get divorced on a simple incomprehension. There it's divorce for a fact. I was not unfaithful so another motive had to be found. But it's unfair and i know arun thinks the same. So if he wanted to divorce me he should have done it in italy,” valentina said.