WHY I LEFT HIM RACHEL HUNTER COULDNT LIVE A LIE

RACHEL Hunter spent sleepless nights plotting her escape from her ex-husband, Rod Stewart, because she couldn’t continue “living a lie” as his devoted wife.

In a bombshell interview this week, the leggy model finally admits why she left the raspy-voiced heartthrob, suggesting her gilded existence was more like a prison than a marriage.

“To the outside world, I was mother of two beautiful kids, a wife to Rod and a successful model without any financial worries, but, inside, I was in torment,” says Hunter, with the divorce from the rock legend two years behind her.

“By the time I was 29, I had spent eight years with someone else’s group of friends.”

Hunter stunned the world when she suddenly walked out on Stewart in 1999. The model, who was 21 when she got into their fairy-tale marriage, admits she had wanted out for some time.

“In the nine years we were together, I’d never done anything for myself,” the 31-year-old blond stunner told the London Mirror. “If you’d asked me then what I liked or didn’t like, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I didn’t even have a hobby.

“Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they’re 25, I felt I no longer had an identity. I was just nothing.”

Hunter was 15 when she became a model in her native New Zealand and was 17 when she was recruited by the Ford modeling agency and moved to New York. At 21, she was whisked into a whirlwind romance with Stewart, and married him in 1991.

She says her way-too-soon marriage to the shaggy-hair rocker quickly consumed her. She had no idea what it was like to have her own crowd or even to meet with girlfriends for a gossipy lunch.

“I’d become so cosseted, I was too scared to do anything for myself. Last year, I took the amazing step of traveling from Los Angeles to London entirely on my own and spent a week just meeting people and making my own friends.”

After two children, ages 8 and 6, and nearly nine years of marriage to a person she calls “a great dad and a good lover,” Hunter says she needed to break Stewart’s heart to free her own.

Even though she left him, Hunter says Stewart was the love of her life.

The relationship was “fiery and tempestuous and it was always fun,” she says. “When he used to say all those things about ‘shaggin’ the missus,’ I really didn’t mind.

“I loved his sense of humor. He’s living proof that a man can laugh you into bed.”

The couple met in a Los Angeles nightclub in 1991, where Stewart recognized her from an aerobics video. To win her, he imitated her workout moves on the dance floor.

They dated for three weeks before he popped the question.

“He took me for a picnic to a lovely park in Los Angeles and got down on one knee to ask me to be his wife,” she says. “At first, I went into complete shock. But I had no hesitation in saying, ‘Yes.’

“He presented me with a beautiful diamond and sapphire ring from Van Cleef.”

Stewart agreed to swear off other women, despite his “Infatuation” with the opposite sex – preferably blondes.

Their short engagement ended in a lavish $100,000 wedding in Los Angeles, complete with glitterati and paparazzi. Their first child, Renee, was born nearly two years later, and then their son, Liam.

While Hunter was enjoying the beginning of her career in modeling, Stewart was just wrapping up his. The age gulf between them was only too clear.

“You don’t understand when you’re 21 and in love that to progress, you need to grow with your partner,” she says. “We didn’t. I soon realized there was a certain difference in attitudes.

“You can’t really expect a 22-year-old girl to react the same way as a man 24 years older than her.”

Hunter realized she needed to leave one day, during a grocery run. At the supermarket, she saw an old woman shuffling down the aisle with her shopping basket and realized that could one day be her.

“I can remember thinking: ‘Here I am, approaching 30’ and ‘Oh, s – – -, what am I doing with my life?” she says. “I knew very definitely in that instant that I didn’t want to get to that age and have any regrets about what I’ve done or not done. It gave me the impetus to move on.”

The news came as a bombshell to Stewart.

“He was distraught,” she says. “I’ll take to the grave the pain that I caused Rod. I hurt the one person I loved and cared about, and that’s a hard thing to live with on a daily basis.”

After she left Stewart, Hunter says she moved back to Los Angeles from their home in London, and now lives in a modest house that stands in stark contrast to the mansions she’s used to.

But it’s the comfortable home she’s always wanted, complete with pillows and candles.

“I left with the only things I wanted – some precious memories, a few photographs of Rod and I with Renee and Liam, and my wedding ring,” she says. “Looking back, it might have been better if we had argued more often. At least that way there’d have been some communication.

“There are people who say I was selfish to break up the family, but I knew that to go on living a lie was a less healthy option for all of us.”

Hunter says she now has the time to concentrate on an acting career; she’s filming a movie, “Ozzie,” in New Zealand. She says she’s not dating.

Rod is back to chasing women and is recovering from the scare of thyroid cancer that could have claimed his raspy singing voice.

“It’s been a long healing process,” she says. “There were moments when I’d be walking along the beach or out riding when sadness would come over me in waves. You can’t walk away from nine years of your life and expect to feel nothing.

“For someone who has always been in a relationship, it’s strange.”

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