Blake and Louise moving to Perth
It's finally official: The Bachelor Blake Garvey is in a relationship with the show's second runner-up Louise Pillidge and they are moving in together in Perth.
Rumours have been swirling that Garvey, 31, had fallen for Pillidge, 26, since he unceremoniously dumped the show's winner Sam Frost weeks after proposing.
Now the couple have come clean via an interview with Woman's Day - and they say they're more in love than ever.
Days after breaking off his engagement, Garvey tracked down Pillidge's father and gave him a five-page letter to pass on to the bubbly blonde.
A few days before the finale aired she received the letter, in which the auctioneer admitted he had made a mistake letting her go.
"My one wish is that I don't want to just be your first love, I want to be your first, last and only," the letter read.
The smooth-talker told the magazine he deeply regretted proposing to Frost but eliminated Pillidge because she was the one he wanted to hurt least.
"She's so fragile that I thought I was protecting her," Garvey said.
"The love I felt for Lou (didn't end) and as much as I tried to file it away, it kept growing."
Pillidge said she was overcome with emotion after reading Garvey's heartfelt words.
"It took me a while to process but that letter was one of the most overwhelming things I had ever experienced," she said.
After a fortnight of intimate phone calls, the couple went to Thailand to be reunited for the first time since they parted in South Africa two months earlier.
"The moment she walked into my arms I knew I was in love with her and I told her as much," Garvey said of the secret rendezvous in Koh Samui. Pillidge also opened up about the pair's first night together, calling it "beautiful".
Now the Queenslander plans to move in with her new partner in his home city of Perth and says marriage is on the cards.
But she'll have to live without the $58,000 engagement ring which Frost, left, now gets to keep, and Pillidge jokes she will "never let him live down".
