“His glasses were fogging up he was so nervous. I kept thinking he really must not have felt well,” Brzezinski said.

Scarborough then plopped down on one knee with an oval-shaped diamond ring set in platinum that he’d been hiding in his suitcase for days and asked her to marry him. “When I saw him on one knee, I started laughing nervously, almost hysterically,” she said. “And then he asked, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

Courtesy of Mika and Joe.

Mika says she suspected the trip’s secret purpose when she saw the hotel, a fairy-tale spot that they said was the nicest place they’ve ever been. But when the first night came and went, and nothing happened, she told herself to stop being crazy. “He can’t keep a secret,” she said. “He just can’t. He always blurts stuff out.”

Scarborough concedes the point. “It would have been more like me to tell her on the way over,” he said. He thought about doing it when he drove her to Monaco in a convertible for a few hours, bringing the ring with him on the ride. But he didn’t feel it was the right place once he got there, and he was happy that he waited. When he put the ring on her finger, he said it looked perfect. “It looked like it was meant to be there.”

Scarborough, who said he broached the topic of marriage with Brzezinski casually a few months ago, said it’s been quite a long ride, and an unexpected one, given that he has been married two times before. “It’s the one part of my life that unfortunately I haven’t gotten right in the past,” Scarborough told me. “I thought after the last time that I would never, ever do this again in a million years,” he said. “Then it occurred to me that with us working together and being live on the air every day for three hours that we were forced, no matter what disagreements we had, what misunderstandings we had, to work through it and get right with each other by 5:59 A.M.”

He continued: “I was talking to a friend a couple months ago, asking if this was stupid. Am I making a terrible mistake? They said that no, that we had extraordinary training on getting through difficult times together, and it’ll only make us a stronger couple and stronger in married life.”

As many in their station know, secrecy can make public life easier. And days later, they are still somewhat uneasy about their decision to bring their relationship public for the first time. Between them, there are six children, several exes, executives, not to mention their little universe of politics, and their audience. “We know that our kids have a lot of options about what they read about us. We wanted to do one interview on the record. To answer the question is just as important for them as it is for us, to say it once that we’re together and we want to be together forever.”

After the one question come many others. Scarborough and Brzezinski still do not officially live together. The couple says they are right now doing a lot of racing around, wondering how to blend their households, where they will find space for their combined three dogs, three cats, two rabbits, and chickens. They have no idea if the news will alter the show’s dynamic now that that alluring, flirty, are-they-aren’t-they tension balloon will be popped for them. Nor do they know how it will impact the newsroom. As one longtime cable-news executive familiar with conversations within MSNBC told me, this certainly makes managing the show trickier. “Joe is MSNBC,” he said. “He’s as important to the network as anyone. And no one wants to be the one to give the most important guy’s wife notes.” (MSNBC declined to comment for the story, as it is about the anchors’ personal life.)