Gabrielle O’Leary, 38, project manager, and Brian Page, 47, marketing director, will have their religious blessing today in Bisley, Surrey

The Canadian marksman Brian Page was captivated by Gabrielle O’Leary’s “enchanting” voice the moment she first spoke to him, under a tree at Bisley, the shooting range in Surrey, in July 2006. Gabrielle, then the captain of the North London Rifle Club, had asked Brian, part of Canada’s national rifle team, about arranging a target rifle shooting match. They continued to “bump into each other” over the next week. Distant glimpses of Gabrielle left Brian with a crush of “Fatal Attraction proportion,” he wryly notes.

“I knew she was the one from the get-go,” he says. Gabrielle was pragmatic. “He gave me the glad eye and I told him to bog off because he lived in Vancouver,” she says crisply. Eventually, Brian’s persistence triumphed. For the next 18 months, he pursued Gabrielle, turning up in London for “business” trips (between them they have clocked 55,000 air miles), taking her out for dinner as a friend, and repeatedly asking her out. The answer? “No, no and never,” Brian recalls.

“I was a hard-nosed Londoner, jaded with dating. I kept saying ‘you don’t really know me’,” Gabrielle says. Once she did, for a quarter of an hour, consider him as a potential husband, but then thought, “Don’t be ridiculous, he lives in Canada.”

The turning point followed a six-month break. “At one point I cut him off,” says Gabrielle. “I thought, ‘He’s got this dreadful crush on me. I have to be cruel to be kind’. ” After she sent an e-mail apologising, he rang, drunk, and said: “I miss you.”

Determined to sort the matter out, Gabrielle booked a week’s holiday in Vancouver. They could, she said, go on a date: this would either “put the friendship in the box”, or move things on. Brian was astonished. “I got the e-mail about her coming just when I was at my lowest ebb,” he says.

Their first date, low-key, was a picnic in front of a log fire in Brian’s home. Their first kiss, the next day, kicked their romance into gear. “When I came home I thought, ‘I’ve just spent time with the kindest man on Earth’,” says Gabrielle. “He is the first man who has really treated me as a human being. We have always got something to do, and something to say.”

In October Gabrielle, an independent, Seventies-bred woman, brought up to “make her own money”, gave up her job as a senior consultant to BT, let her house, abandoning all London-based security, to move in with Brian in Vancouver. “The crunch for me was the night before I handed in my notice,” she says. “I thought, ‘I am letting go of everything here’.” Family and friends were 100 per cent supportive. “My father said, ‘You’ve got to go or you will never find out’.”

Every day Brian considers himself fortunate to know Gabrielle: “I’ve never met anyone with such diversity of interests.” He proposed on a snowy day in Vancouver as they dined with friends. The pudding at the restaurant, unordered by Gabrielle, arrived with the words “Will you marry me?” piped on to the surface. She burst into tears. Their civil wedding took place on March 1 in Tofino, on a 50-mile beach on the west of Vancouver Island. They wed holding daffodils — Gabrielle has Welsh blood, and competed for Wales in the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Her family in England stayed up late to view the service, part of an elopement package, via Skype. “The marriage commissioner said, ‘Most people elope to get away from their family — you have brought yours with you’.”

Their religious blessing today takes place under the tree where, roughly three years ago, they first met.