Wild Open Hearts (Bluewater Billionaires) - Kathryn Nolan

1

Luna

It was a beautiful day to be accused of fraud.

I flashed my trademark cheerful smile at Sylvia Lee, the president of my board and my long-time mentor. “Can you repeat that, Sylvia? I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”

“Ferris Mark lied to us,” she replied, with a face so pinched I winced in sympathy. She tapped a manicured finger on a sheet of paper I really didn’t want to examine that closely. “An investigative reporter went undercover at one of their factories and discovered that all of the ingredients they source to cosmetics companies like ours are absolutely, one-hundred-percent tested on animals.”

Wild Heart’s headquarters were located on Miami Beach’s infamous Ocean Drive, which meant my wall-to-wall windows let in a dazzling panorama of white sand and turquoise waves dotted with vibrantly colored beachgoers. I usually felt a decadent love for my tropical hometown. But today, as I watched a lifeguard race by my office window on a skateboard, I was tempted to yank the window open, leap outside, and steal that skateboard for myself.

Because surely, a clumsy escape by skateboard was preferable to the career-ending mess in front of me.

There was a knock at my door. Jasmine Hernandez, the head of Wild Heart public relations, was staring at me with an expression that said you’re so fucked.

“How bad is it?” I asked Jasmine.

“Nuclear.” Her head was down, fingers flying over her cell phone.

I took a sip of my ever-present green smoothie, grimaced, then pushed it away. I opened up a drawer and grabbed an emergency stash of Fritos corn chips—they were one of the only store-brand vegan snacks around, and I’d been mainlining them since college. During moments of stress or anxiety, I could finish a bag in five minutes flat.

I had a feeling this was going to be one of those moments.

Six years ago, Wild Heart inked a massively lucrative deal to sell our eco-friendly and cruelty-free cosmetics throughout the Fischer Home Goods department stores. The deal had solidified my position as one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. Wild Heart became the third-largest cosmetics company, right behind Revlon, and was currently valued at $4.5 billion.

Six years ago, to meet our new increased demand from Fischer, I’d made the decision to drop our former supplier and go with Ferris Mark. They were faster. Cheaper. I’d assumed it was a wise business decision—had been proud of it, actually. You could be financially successful while maintaining your compassionate values.

I finally scanned the page. Force feeding, lethal doses, irritation tests.

Well. Maybe you couldn’t.

“Are we sure this is real?” I asked, around a mouth full of corn chips.

My phone started to vibrate. And vibrate. And vibrate. None of this was a positive sign.

I slapped a hand over my phone. Re-pasted my smile on—which was now officially fake. That was new.

“Very real,” Sylvia said. “The story is going to break any minute. It’s not just Wild Heart that’s implicated, but four other major cruelty-free cosmetics lines. Our competitors.”

That meant massive amounts of secret, horrible animal testing had been happening for years and none of us knew it. My fingers kept circling lethal dose testing, a particularly heinous way of testing the safety of new cosmetics ingredients on animals by getting them to die in a variety of ways. I was all for safety—always—but when I founded Wild Heart at twenty-two, it was on the basis that cosmetics companies had more than enough ingredients at their disposal to produce high-quality makeup. No new ingredients meant no need for safety testing—protecting humans and animals in equal measure.

“We need to pull the products,” I said. “Every last one. I don’t care how much it costs. And we need a new supplier like yesterday. I’ll halt production until then.”

An action that would cost us untold amounts of lost revenue. An action that the tiny billionaire-shaped devil on my shoulder was pissed about.

“That’s a lot of money,” Sylvia said softly, voicing my concerns out loud. “I’m not saying we don’t support the same response. I want to make sure you’re positive, Luna.”

My heart knocked against my chest—you’ll lose it all, you’ll lose it all. I inhaled. Exhaled. Behind Sylvia’s head was a framed cover from TIME Magazine: there I was, laughing into the sun in a field of flowers. The headline read: Luna da Rosa Believes Makeup Can Save the World.

“We have to do it. It’s the right thing to do. And obviously we’ve been caught in the crossfire,” I said firmly, hushing the tiny devil. “We’ll make