So how secret were the Kenny Chesney/Renee Zellweger nuptials? Kenny didn't tell his band about Monday's wedding until two nights before.

They were all on stage at a Fort Lauderdale concert. As the show was closing, Kenny spoke to band members through their in-ear monitors, telling them while they were still playing that he'd be getting married Monday, his publicist said.

Band members weren't at Kenny's private ceremony at his estate in St. John's in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In fact, very few people were. Only about 45 attended, no celebrities, just close friends and family for the bride and groom and some of Kenny's island friends.

You've heard about Renee's Carolina Herrera dress. Kenny wore a white buttoned shirt, natural-colored linen pants. Both were barefoot. And yes, the ceremony was a brief 15-minute outdoors affair on top of a hill on his property.

Laughter and tears all around. And get this — no engagement ring. Both just have simple wedding bands.

The reception was a cold buffet indoors, also on Kenny's property.

''I am so incredibly happy,'' Kenny said in a statement released last night. ''I may well be the luckiest man alive, to be so in love with someone who is so perfect for me. It's just hard to imagine that I'm not going to wake up.''

Despite previous assertions that Kenny and Renee had just met a couple of weeks ago, Kenny's publicist now confirms that they met at a tsunami relief concert in January. The two began a phone/e-mail relationship far more intense that most people's, his publicist said.

''People whose lives are lived on the move — the reality of fitting a life into that life — the processes are different. You fit a lot more into phone calls and e-mails,'' publicist Holly Gleason said.

Those must've been some long e-mails. But I digress.

Any honeymoon would be a short one: Kenny is supposed to be in concert tomorrow night in Little Rock, Ark., and Renee has a movie, Cinderella Man, with Russell Crowe, opening June 3.

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