All roads lead to Tino Franco? When Zach Shallcross was choosing the perfect engagement ring for fiancée Kaity Biggar, he wasn’t able to give her the one she wanted the most — because of the Neil Lane rock picked on the previous season.
“I thought it was gonna be stressful,” the Bachelor, 26, revealed of his jewelry-picking process during a Wednesday, March 29, appearance on the “Chicks in the Office” podcast. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is the moment.’ I don’t want to [mess it up].’”
Zach explained that “almost immediately” he saw the oval-cut bauble and thought it “screams Kaity without a doubt.” While the ABC personality admitted that the ring was “a little big” in size, he could already see the 28-year-old nurse wearing it on her ring finger. While Kaity eagerly accepted the Neil Lane stunner, it wasn’t exactly what she envisioned.
“My ideal ring, and I’ve told Zach this, would be a gold band with an emerald cut on top,” she told the podcast hosts. “But I guess, Tino gave that to Rachel [Recchia] last season, but either way, [I’m] so grateful. Like, it is a gorgeous ring.”
Zach chimed in, joking: “It is the second best ring and she loves it — second.”
The Bachelorette season 19 alum was one of Rachel’s final three suitors on her joint season with Gabby Windey last year, opting to self-eliminate after fantasy suites. The pilot, 27, ultimately chose Tino, 28, for her final rose and they got engaged during the season finale. However, they ended up breaking up weeks later after the contractor confessed to cheating on Rachel.
Zach, for his part, was named the season 27 lead of The Bachelor. During Monday’s finale, he sent fellow finalist Gabi Elnicki home before popping the question to Kaity.
“The entire show has been very expedited, right? It’s two and a half months and we’ve been living in hiding, essentially, for the past five, six months and everything has been so rushed that it’s finally our time to just relax,” the California native exclusively told Us Weekly after the finale of the couple’s next steps. “There’s some things that we want to do before, you know, taking that leap [of getting married]. We have the rest of our lives to build a family and to get married, to have a house. So it’s like, ‘Let’s just focus on you and I in Austin and the rest will happen.’ And it’s always flexible. There’s nothing contingent.”
