Post-'Bachelorette,' Trista and Ryan anticipate togetherness

NEW YORK -- No, Trista isn't pregnant. No, she never went joy-riding with Charlie.

Dispelling false rumors was on the agenda Thursday when "Bachelorette" babe Trista Rehn and her man, Ryan Sutter, took questions from reporters as part of a publicity blitz.

The night before, on the finale of ABC's dating-game series "The Bachelorette," Trista had surprised most oddsmakers by choosing Ryan, a poetry-writing firefighter from Vail, Colo., over the more dashing finalist Charlie Maher, a financier from Los Angeles, where Trista also lives.

"There was an unspoken chemistry that Ryan and I had that told me he was the one," Trista explained. "We complement each other very nicely."

Of course, they've been complementing each other mostly over the phone since shooting on the series wrapped about three months ago. Maintaining suspense for the audience was a paramount concern.

Even so, "I like to think of my relationship as being a relationship, and not just a relationship on television, even though that's how you guys see it," Trista told reporters.

"The Bachelorette" premiered Jan. 8 with Ryan and 24 other suitors vying for roses from Trista, a 30-year-old physical therapist and former Miami Heat cheerleader. Though it scored healthy ratings, the series suffered in comparison to Fox's similar "Joe Millionaire," which premiered the same week and concluded Monday by drawing an enormous 34.6 million viewers.

The two-hour "Bachelorette" finale attracted 20.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen, against strong competition including 90 minutes of "American Idol" on Fox that averaged 18 million viewers.