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So in Love

Originally posted Thursday July 20, 2006 12:00 PM EDT

"I love to travel and road-trip," says Bullock (hitting the road with James in '05). Photo by: Fame

If skeptics doubted their odd-couple matchup – "Did you lose a bet?" David Letterman jokingly asked Bullock in June – the pair quickly discovered they clicked. Their youths may play like something out of The Breakfast Club – the Rebel and the Cheerleader – but both emerged with the same relentless drive: James used his gifts as a welder and his smarts as a businessman to create his West Coast Choppers empire, while Bullock's breakout role in 1994's Speed transformed her into a superstar. What's more, they share an allergy to phoniness. "Sandy has a great bull detector – always has," says Lawrence. "She wouldn't be with anyone who wasn't the real thing."

Like his beloved pit bull Cisco, James's snarl hides a puppyish sweetness. In his hometown of Long Beach, he has used his West Coast Choppers shop to help the community, spreading the wealth from his $60,000-and-up custom bikes and offering jobs to clients at a neighboring homeless shelter – a generosity matched by Bullock, who has written million-dollar checks to tsunami and Katrina relief efforts.

Why do they work as a couple? "I'm as stubborn as he is," Bullock told Letterman. "I will try anything once, as you can see he does all the time." As she put it to the Rev. Dr. Robert Laha, who met the couple while Bullock filmed a scene for her upcoming thriller Premonition at his former Shreveport, La., church in May, "She said, 'He's gotten over the wildness and I'm the wild one now!' "