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Please continue reading if you’ve read the story starter – a very long Chapter 1 – and you’re ready to dive into the story with me.

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About the story: (short description. Click here for longer)

“Let Me Love You” is a tale of love and sacrifice and a poignant story of self-discovery, celebrating the human capacity to find love in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Please enjoy the current WIP of Iris and El. This will be published freely up to a point, like in the old days, and then the entire book will be posted for full download. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And don’t forget to check out the companion stories. (Wicked Chances, Dreams of Reality, The Convenient Wife, The Other Side of Love, She Works Hard for the Money & Ravenous)

Enjoy, Your Author, Sylvia Hubbard

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Read more: Let Me Love You – Chapter 68✍🏾📚❤️ #SylLit #WIP #livestory 📖💓 #marriedwife #demandedconsensual #darkromance

Author’s Note: Trying to round up this story and bring in the resolutions. Got questions? Am I missing something/ Let Me Know

PS. I don’t like Blaque Heart at all. I can’t wait until Onyx and her have it out.

Out of exhaustion, her consciousness took her back to sleep, and Iris regretted the decision once she awoke in the basement of a house. Iris could smell the mildew and old pipe smell, which was cold. The lower space of the house was only lit by sparse candles here and there, and she heard something scatter around the dark parts—small. Most likely, it was a rat smelling around the edges for food.
She smelled no food, and her stomach and every sore muscle growled in protest. How long had she been in the box, and how long had she been trussed up on a cold, dirty floor in her once pristine white nightgown? 
The small plates she’d had only gave her enough energy to endure another round of sex with El. Not to fight her way out of being kidnapped by a mercenary. 
At least she was no longer in the box, but her body was racked in pain from being in there for so long. Her hands and feet were still bound, and her mouth was still covered. The dress was ruined. 
El was going to be very upset about her dirtiness. 
Iris almost wanted to laugh, but she was so miserable that she had to hurry and wipe the tears that uncontrollably rolled down her cheek.
Black boots could be seen coming down the rickety wooden stairs of the basement, but Iris couldn’t believe what she couldn’t hear. The footsteps made no noise. Were her ears covered? No one could walk on old wooden stairs silently. 
Blaque, in a one-piece dark brown leather body suit with high brown boots, ended at the bottom of the stairs and asked, “Are you awake this time? The lack of oxygen made you loopy. I’m not used to transporting live bodies.” Her tone was humorous, but her face was solemn as if it were a heart attack. 
Iris’s mouth was still covered, so she couldn’t respond except to shoot daggers at the despicable dark woman. 
After walking over to a suitcase and retrieving something inside, Blaque dumped some clothes in front of Iris and kneeled on one knee, pulling out a small three-inch blade. “I’m going to release you, but if you say one thing I don’t like, you can expect me to slit those beautiful lips a millimeter at a time. My record is twenty pieces. And once I start, I won’t stop. No crying. No begging will make me stop.”
The odd thing was that Blaque’s tone of voice was conversational as if she were telling a funny little story about a funny little thing, but every word that came out of her mouth was more horrific than the last. 
Iris slowly nodded to show she understood what the woman had said, but she still tensed as the blade came next to her lip, loosening the duct tape covering her mouth. Blaque cut through her binds like butter, then stood back and watched like Iris was about to jump up and attack.
Far from thinking anything about putting her hands near this woman, Iris removed her binds and then slowly stood up, gathering the clothing that had been thrown at her. “Where can I change?” she asked.
Blaque looked around the room as if there were a crowd of people. “No one is here, silly girl. And you haven’t gotten anything I’ve already seen.” She walked over to a camp stove on a table and started to light it. 
Turning her back to Blaque, Iris shredded the once beautiful wedding dress, which was now grayed and ripped, and the tattered veil. It took everything in her not to cry at the ruined dress.
“He didn’t order that,” Blaque said.
Iris didn’t want to hear anything this woman had to say, but it unnerved her to know Blaque could read her mind even with their backs turned to each other. A cramp in her stomach came, and she was hungry or had to pee. Both seemed to feel the same about now.
The vile woman continued kicking a bucket across to Iris, “His lawyer arranges things like that – quick weddings and other borderline things to get women for his clients. Sharlie is going to expose them all soon.” Her chuckle was more to herself than for Iris’s amusement. 
Looking disgusted down at the bucket, an indicator to use the bathroom, Iris huffed, having no choice. 
Blaque tossed a Ziploc bag with wipes inside. They were cold as hell, but Iris couldn’t help but appreciate the clean-up. 
“Pour the bucket out at that sink and put your garbage in the trash,” Blaque instructed.
Pulling a warm sweater over her body and quickly putting on the wool socks, Iris asked, “You know Sharlie Costello?” Since she hadn’t spoken in a while and with all the screaming she had been doing before this, her voice hurt and came out scratchy as she followed Blaque’s orders. 
Blaque still had her back to Iris. “Doesn’t everyone? She visited your house, right? Or your aunt’s house, I should say? That place is a fortress. What’s the old lady hiding in there? Dead bodies?” She turned, stirring a cup of coffee. 
“Stay away from my aunt’s house, but why would you know someone like Sharlie Costello?”
“She gives me the information I need on those Detroit cousins of mine. And she helped me hide something once that was important to someone else. She discovers secrets I can’t find without getting too close, and I won’t do that. I like my neck exactly where it is.”
“Is everyone trying to hunt you down?” Iris asked, annoyed.
“I do kill people. I expect retribution; my family doesn’t take it too kindly. I’ve decided to murder them. My motives are justified.” There was that conversational tone again, as if she were discussing the spring flight pattern of the monarch butterfly. 
Iris shunned the chill that swept over her body and didn’t want to go into Blaque’s family business. Salacious had told Iris enough. “How could you befriend Sharlie when she’s doing El dirty?” 
There was a shift immediately in Blaque’s mood, and the temperature seemed to drop in the room as darkness moved over her face. “Are you trying to incentivize me to put a bullet between her eyes?”
“As much as that would help him right now after the shit she wrote about him, I’m not telling you to do anything, Blaque, but I can’t think of a reason why your loyalty to him would diminish to make you side with that vindictive woman.”
“I’m looking at her,” Blaque responded and then sipped her coffee. 
Iris wasn’t hungry for coffee, but she needed food. “Are you holding me hostage or just playing games with El?”
“Both. As I said, whatever my brother wants, I need. Thwarting him will keep him from getting what he wants.”
“You’re going to kill him anyway. Why make his life miserable?”
Blaque gripped the coffee cup as if she were about to use it as a weapon, and she probably could, but why would a question like that make this dangerous woman look killing mad? 
Through clenched teeth, Blaque hissed, “Because he doesn’t deserve any type of happiness, and he took the one thing I told him he couldn’t have.”
Iris looked around the basement and saw a decent chair on the other side of the room. She casually walked over there, glad it was some distance from Blaque, but made it appear she needed the chair to put on the sneakers that were a size too large for her feet. If she were trying to research this out for El to get ahead of the situation, Iris needed to evaluate Blaque carefully without getting killed. “So you’re offering me to my father in exchange for his formula? And then what?”
“And then I get out of town before my cousins can get their hands around my neck.” Blaque wickedly smiled as if she would almost enjoy trying to get killed. 
“And what happens to me?”
“Well, if your father has his way, you will never see El again, which helps me. Your father will probably sequester you back into that box until you do exactly what he wants. As for your nephew, I’m sure your aunt will keep him until your father goes to the courts and gets him.”
Iris trembled at the statement because it was the truth, and she shivered at the idea of living in that box again. Yet, there was a boon in all this. Blaque didn’t know that her father didn’t have the formula, and Iris wouldn’t say. Perhaps it could help El save her if he knew where she was.
Blaque continued boastfully, “El will be heartbroken, and of course, he’ll need to relieve himself somewhere.” She put down the coffee cup, grabbed a chair near the table, and straddled it to face Iris.
Even when this demonic woman sat down, it didn’t settle Iris’s fear of her. 
“Are you done with your questions while you think of ways to escape me?”
There she went, reading Iris’s thoughts. “I’m about to give up on that matter, but there’s nothing on the forefront right now I want to ask you. I wish you’d get this over with, and then I can go about my business of being miserable for the rest of my life.”
Blaque smirked. “I see why El likes you. You’re so amendable. How long does he make you soak in the bleach baths?”
Iris’s eyes uncontrollably flared because she hadn’t been ready for that question. “I don’t need to soak in bleach baths for him to touch me.”
“Liar! He wouldn’t touch you if you didn’t.”
“I won’t sit here and argue with you, Blaque. The man has never ordered me to sit in a bleach bath, and I don’t need to when I have my own hygienic line of products to make sure I clean every nook and cranny of my-“
Blaque shot out of the chair and came to stand in front of Iris so fast that Iris almost fell back if Blaque didn’t reach out and hold down Iris’s thighs. The woman leaned in close to her neck and sniffed her long and hard as if she was trying to suck the DNA out of her body.
Standing back up, Blaque’s eyes narrowed. “And is that baby his or Dwayne’s?”
“What? No, I’m not-” Iris flushed, remembering what the lawyer said. “I’m on my period.”
Blaque sniggered and stepped away. “I think it’s a girl. Oh, your father’s going to love that. Another girl he can impregnate,” she sang.

End of This Chapter | Post your thoughts in the comment | Let the author know what’s going on in your head

Let Me Love You (c) 2025 Sylvia Hubbard All Rights Reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
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