Page 16 of Falling for your Fake Boyfriend

“Well then, I guess we dare.”

The smell was stronger once we opened the door. I pressed my hand to my nose. “No one on Instagram mentioned the odor.” I peered up at him cautiously. “Proceed or chicken out?”

“Well, if you put it that way—proceed.”

The first thing we noticed was that the floor was littered with pale ivory crunchy gravel, like in a bar where they throw peanut shells on the ground. We both stared down at the floor. “Shells?” I asked hopefully.

“I say we go with that,” Luke said.

Shelves cut across the gritty floor like the stacks in a dingy, haunted library. Two yellow light bulbs were gripped by skeleton hand sconces jutting from the walls. “Cheesy,” I muttered.

Luke pressed a hand against my shoulder. “Uh, have you taken a closer look at these jars?”

I turned from the skeleton sconces and came face-to-face with a small, weird face. It was staring at me through a glass jar filled with amber liquid. The little creature had claws for hands, webbed feet and a humanish face. I sidled behind Luke and glanced at it again from behind the safety of his broad back. “That’s seriously the creepiest thing. Do you think it’s real?” I asked.

Luke shook his head. “I’d say a movie prop or something.”

“I say we go with that,” I repeated his earlier sentiment. The rest of the shelf was filled with more of the same pieced together creatures, the stuff of nightmares and certainly the stuff of someone’s wild imagination. Still, I stayed tucked safely behind Luke’s back and peered past his shoulder at the jars on the shelf as if the creatures might, at any moment, hop out of their containers.

When an old speaker overhead crackled to life, I pushed right up against him, grabbing the back of his T-shirt for safety. Low, eerie music that reminded me of wind howling through a dark forest floated down from the speaker.

Luke turned his head to the side to talk to the woman crouched behind him with her small fist balled in his shirt. “Ah, we must have paid for the deluxe experience, complete with crypt-like music.”

I pressed my face into that same bunch of fabric to stifle a laugh. Something about the place didn’t invite an uninhibited giggle.

Luke had no choice but to lead the way because I tailed behind him. “Oh, wow.” He stopped suddenly enough that I bumped into his hard back. I stumbled back on my heels.

His handsome profile appeared over his shoulder again. “You all right back there?”

“I am, but do I want to see what triggered the ‘oh, wow’ comment?”

“Well, are you going to tell your Instagram followers that you missed the mermaid skeleton?”

“No way.” My feet crunched the little shards of gravel as I left my hiding spot. The skeleton was human from neck to hips where it abruptly turned into a skeletal tail. It was the head that was disconcerting enough for me to gasp. It was a monstrous skull with giant eyes and teeth that looked as if they could chew through granite. “That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows mermaids are beautiful, and they have great singing voices.”

Luke chuckled. “Oh, Walt Disney, what have you wrought on our generation? You do realize that mermaids are fictional, right?”

I shrugged. “No proof either way.”

“Can’t argue with that. Looks like we’re heading around the corner, and the sign says ‘Not for people with weak hearts.’”

I glanced up at him and temporarily forgetting our location, a silly detail hit me. Luke had a single dimple on his right cheek. “I don’t know about you, but if we skip it, I’m going to spend the rest of the day, week even, wondering what was past that sign.”

“Then we forge ahead,” he said. I promptly tucked myself behind his broad back.

We turned past a shelf that was filled with dusty taxidermy trophies, mostly ravens and even a few snakes. “Hmm,” Luke said. I still hadn’t braved a look around his shoulder. “Copies of medieval torture devices.”

“Not copies.”

We both startled and turned around. The odd-little museum curator had come out of a side door. He was standing right beneath an iron gibbet hanging from the ceiling.

“Everything is authentic.” He had one extra-long tooth on the bottom that stuck out as he spoke.

“Everything?” Luke asked, wryly.

His earflaps moved as he lifted and lowered his head in what was possibly the creepiest nod I’d ever seen. I stepped back, suddenly wanting to put more distance between me and the museum curator. My ankle twisted slightly as I stepped on what felt like a large chunk of something hard. His beady eyes dropped to my feet.

“Be careful of the bones. Some of them haven’t been ground down enough yet.”

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