  A symmetry-preserving treatment of a vector-vector contact interaction is
used to study charmed heavy-light mesons. The contact interaction is a
representation of nonperturbative kernels used in Dyson-Schwinger and
Bethe-Salpeter equations of QCD. The Dyson-Schwinger equation is solved for the
$u,\,d,\,s$ and $c$ quark propagators and the bound-state Bethe-Salpeter
amplitudes respecting spacetime-translation invariance and the
Ward-Green-Takahashi identities associated with global symmetries of QCD are
obtained to calculate masses and electroweak decay constants of the
pseudoscalar $\pi,\,K$, $D$ and $D_s$ and vector $\rho$, $K^*$, $D^*$, and
$D^*_s$ mesons. The predictions of the model are in good agreement with
available experimental and lattice QCD data.
