Free Downtown Devil: Book 2 in series (Sins in the City) by Cara McKenna Page A

text, wanting to know if he planned to see Clare again. Vaughn was pretty sure she was into him, judging by how curious she’d been when they’d talked. But either the coffee shop got busy or else Mica didn’t think it warranted a reply, and he never did get an answer.
    Vaughn was a by-the-book kind of guy. He met a girl, realized he liked her, asked her to dinner. He’d never in his life used any sort of hookup app or dating site. He met women through work; he’d casually dated a couple of nurses. He met women at parties or at a club, occasionally, though he was getting a little old for that scene. But he met women in the wild, as it were, took them out for a meal or drinks, got to know them.
    He wasn’t such a gentleman that he’d not ever taken a woman home that same night, but he tried to not ever hook up unless he thought he wanted to see the girl again. He’d done the get-laid-by-any-means-necessary thing when he’d been younger. The older he got, though, the more lame it felt in the morning, waking up next to somebody you didn’t feel much for, or didn’t feel like you knew at all.
    How Mica could disappear before a girl had woken up and found herself in a strange apartment, Vaughn couldn’t fathom. The guy was probably useless at returning a text, too, probably kept women waiting by the phone, and not even as part of some lame, macho head game to keep them eager. Vaughn could admit it—it burned him, some. This was his best friend, after all. He wished he could say that distinction belonged to a guy who treated women with just a little more consideration.
    When Vaughn had been about sixteen, teetering on the precipice of losing his virginity, his dad had told him,
Any girl who’ll have your fool ass, you be grateful. You’re too young to know what love is, but I taught you respect, so you treat girls like you know I’d treat your mom if she was still with us
.
    That had made an impression. Not enough to keep a teenage boy from fucking things up and breaking a heart or two, but enough to leave Vaughn feeling shitty about it afterward. Guilt was powerful. Both his parents had taught him that. And in time he’d come to learn that disappointing yourself—not meeting your own expectations about thekind of man you were—felt as ugly as knowing you’d let your folks down. And maybe a little earlier than most men, Vaughn had quit getting himself into positions to do so.
    Mica, though . . . He hadn’t grown up with decent parents. Not with any real kind of parents at all. Nobody to teach him this shit, nobody to model any respectable persuasion of manhood. There were withered parts inside him, stunted from never having been nurtured by responsible guardians—empathy, respect, kindness of most any sort.
    But the guy had good qualities, too. He was fearless, both physically and socially. He was creative. He was charming . . . if also a touch manipulative. He was exciting, more than anything else. But nobody had taught him how to be sympathetic or thoughtful. Nobody had shown him what that felt like, as a kid. And a neglected kid made for a pretty fucked-up man.
    Vaughn had never known his friend to stick with the same woman for more than a week or two. Though it never showed on his face, and he’d never come out and said so, Mica got spooked the second a lover started expecting anything from him aside from fun and sex. Expectations didn’t compute.
    Clare was a nice girl. Seemed smart, too, and Vaughn wondered if she was smart enough to realize already that hoping for something real with Mica was an exercise in frustration.
    “She’ll find out soon enough,” he muttered, getting to his feet, carrying his plate and cup to the sink. Jealousy squirmed in his guts, imagining catching her slipping out of Mica’s room one morning soon, or out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel or something. It wasn’t a simple jealousy, though. Not at all.
    Nothing between him and Mica had ever been simple.

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