A date has not been set for the wedding but friends expect it to take place in April, although exactly where remains a mystery. "The world is her oyster," her close friend and bridesmaid-to-be Jo Ferguson said yesterday.

"It's really good news for her. They have been going out for a while now and she really loves him. She deserves this." Two years ago the Herald revealed Hinze was the mystery blonde dubbed the "Aussie angel" spotted aboard the Texan's $100 million super-yacht, the Athena. She and Mr Clark cruised the waters of French Polynesia, stopping at Tahiti, Bora Bora and Rangiroa. In March, Hinze spoke for the first time about her relationship with the father and grandfather, admitting she did not expect to fall in love with a man so many years her senior.

"I never thought I was going to date an older man when I first met him," she told The Australian Women's Weekly. "To me, it was different to hang out with someone with something to say that was so interesting and important and who was truly, incredibly intelligent. He's handsome and has so much charisma - and he's so funny." Mr Clark met Hinze in 2006, about the same time he paid more than $US125 million to his third wife, the former Forbes reporter Nancy Rutter, to whom he had been married for 15 years.

At the time court papers showed the settlement gave Rutter $US100 million in cash, stocks, bonds and securities at Goldman Sachs; $US23 million in farmland; a $US1 million home in New Orleans; a $US600,000 stake in the ownership of a Cessna Citation V jet; an undisclosed number of horses; and an undisclosed amount in jewellery, furniture and personal effects. At the time Mr Clark told the Palm Beach Post: "I'm not getting married again. Or if I do, it'll be with a pre-nup."