“I bet it’s the pièce de résistance. I bet they press play right after the turducken comes out.”

“Yeah. You’d probably win.” He seems quietly resigned. A big man with a put-upon-but-enduring air. In an utterly charming way.

“But how do you blackmail someone from this? How much worse can it get?”

He sighs again. His broad shoulders lift, then fall. “When my aunt called, she briefly mentioned uploading it on Facebook. Tagging the NASA official page.”

I gasp into my hand. I shouldn’t laugh. This is horrible. But. “Are you serious?”

“It’s not a healthy family.”

“No shit.”

He shrugs, like he’s past caring. “At least they’re not trying to extort money out of me yet.”

“Right.” I nod solemnly and collect my features into what hopefully passes for a compassionate, respectful expression. “The assignment I told you about is for my Water Resources class, so this is surprisingly on topic. And I am truly sorry that you got stuck with meeting your little cousin’s friend because you publicly urinated in a Lowe’s when you barely knew how to talk.”

Ian’s eyes settle on me, as if to size me up. I thought I had his full attention from the moment I sat down, but I realize that I was wrong. For the first time, he’s looking at me like he’s interested in actually seeing me. He studies me, assesses me, and my first impression of him—detached, distant—instantly evaporates. There is something nearly palpable about his presence: a warm, tingling sensation climbing up my spine.

“I don’t mind,” he says again. I smile, because I know that this time he means it.

“Good.” I push my tea to the side. “So, what would you be doing right now, if three-year-old you had known about sanitary sewers?”

This time his smile is a tad more defined. I’m winning him over, which is good, very good, because I’m rapidly developing a thing for the contrast between his eyelashes (red!) and his deep-set eyes (blue!). “I’d probably be running a bunch of tests.”

“At the Jet Propulsion Lab?”

He nods.

“Tests on . . . ?”

“A rover.”

“Oh.” My heart skips three beats. “For space exploration?”

“Mars.”

I lean closer, not even bothering to play it like I’m not avidly interested. “Is that your current project?”

“One of them, yeah.”

“And what are the tests for?”

“Mostly attitude, figuring out where the ship is positioned in three-dimensional space. Pointing, too.”

“You work on a gyroscope?”

“Yes. My team is perfecting the gyroscope so that once the rover is on Mars, it knows where it is, what it’s looking at. Informs the other systems about its coordinates and movements, too.”

My heart is now fully pitter-pattering. This sounds . . . wow. Pornographic, almost. Exactly my jam. “And you do this in Houston? At the Space Center?”

“Usually. But I come up here when there are issues. I’ve been struggling with the imagery, and the feed update keeps lagging even though it shouldn’t, and—” He shakes his head, as if catching himself halfway through a rant that’s been playing over and over in his mind. But I finally know what he’d rather be doing.