Well he and the Chief Enginneer on board Aventine have a very flirtasous conversation in Mere Mortals and even arange a date for after the war is over!
Wow. Now that's what I call character development. ;-)
Seriously, I do hope they make something out of that. Two chief engineers could easily end up encouraging each other for making better engines or even have a rivalry about who's better in their job.
Long distance relationships have their certain conflicting appeal too with seldomly seeing each other or not knowing if one can trust the other to be faithful.
We'll see.