The world was surprised when People magazine's Larry Hackett broke the news on " Good Morning America " last week that Katie Couric was engaged and, it turns out, the veteran TV anchor and talk show host was just as shocked as everyone else by the new bling on her ring finger.

"It did come out of the blue a little bit," Couric, 56, said today on " Good Morning America." "We hadn't really discussed much recently and I'd kind of tabled the whole thing [and] thought, 'Well, we'll see what happens.'"

See Katie Couric's Impressive Engagement Ring

Couric's now fiancé, 50-year-old financier John Molner, had a different plan and proposed to his girlfriend of nearly one-and-a-half years at sunset on the beach in East Hampton, N.Y., over Labor Day.

Molner got down on one knee with a cushion-cut diamond with a simple band that he, according to Couric, had been "scheming in a very stealthy way" to produce.

"He did it all on his own," Couric said of the impressive diamond, which she first debuted while watching a match at the US Open with Molner just days after news of their engagement broke.

"At the last minute he brought in a wing woman to kind of give it the seal of approval," she said. "It was kind of a shock to me but an exciting shock."

The public will have a chance to see Molner, the head of mergers and acquisitions in Chicago at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., when he stops by the season premiere of Katie's talk show today in a visit that, once again, surprised Couric.

"I didn't know he was showing up," she said. "It required a little bit of a push from our staff."

Molner will become the stepfather to Couric's two daughters, Elli and Carrie, her two children with her late husband Jay Monahan, who died from colon cancer in 1998.