Willis is not the first to be taken by Bravo's striking beauty and what her friend calls her "huge heart." But for the longtime fixture in Marbella's high-society scene, life has not always been so glamorous. Her father, Alfonso Gonzalez Aranda, reportedly has three convictions in Spain for dealing drugs. And though her mother, Angeles Bravo Jorba, is now a self-described "housewife" who lives in Marbella, she once ran a seedy strip bar called La Reina in the nearby resort town of Estepona. Bravo was 24 when she married Canadian helicopter pilot John Pierre Gonyou. They lived together in Miami Beach and later in California. But by 1998 the couple had split, and Bravo returned to Marbella, a seaside playground for wealthy Europeans. There, she began modeling and worked for an agency that stocked VIP parties throughout Spain with beautiful women.

It was at the opening of Planet Hollywood in Madrid in November of 1998 that Bravo met Willis, and the two began dating a few months later. By all accounts, Willis is unabashed in his affection for her. While in Munich for the German premiere of The Whole Nine Yards last month, Willis and Bravo -- along with a group of about 20, including Willis's brother David, 36, who coproduced Yards -- spent a lively evening at the chic Primo restaurant. According to owner Cesareto Adriano, they feasted on veal in black truffle sauce (Willis's favorite), fresh gnocchi (potato dumplings) with veal ragout, and "nonstop red wine -- Bruce loves red wine," says Adriano. "He and Maria were really sweet together, cuddly and warm." The story was much the same in Marbella a couple of days later. A few rounds at the Golf Club de las Brisas ("Maria is better than Bruce," says a pal with a laugh), dinner with friends, dancing till dawn. "She's a very simpatica girl, not overly impressed with the fact that he's Bruce Willis," says her friend Pedro Eyzaguirre Carlson, a golf-course developer. "When they're together she just acts normally. It's not 'Bruce! Bruce! Bruce!'"

Which is more than Bravo can say for the paparazzi who hound them in Europe. "It makes me uncomfortable that people stare at me like I'm a monkey," she says. But if anyone can teach her to roll with the punches -- and probably to throw them now and then -- it's the man behind the infamous Smirk. "It's difficult weaving my way through this path of being referred to as a 'superstar,' " Willis said last month. "So I try to make fun of it." A harder task might be weaving his way through a still unsettled personal life. Neither meaningfully married nor officially divorced, he is, as Moore's publicist Allen Eichhorn says, "separated. That's where it sits. There is no more insight." Nor has he truly unpacked his bags since he moved out of the log-style cabin he and his family shared until two years ago. But for the moment, it seems, in the moment is where Willis wants to stay. As Bravo puts it, "Wherever we are, we make our home."

-- KAREN S. SCHNEIDER -- PAMELA WARRICK, KEN BAKER and LORENZO BENET in Los Angeles, KEITH RAETHER in Hailey, KAREN NICKEL ANHALT in Munich, JANE WALKER in Madrid and NINA BIDDLE in Marbella