Free Snowbound Baby (Silhouette Romance) by Susan Meier

laughing.
    “Oh, yeah, that was really funny.”
    She gooed delightedly.
    He sighed and reminded himself he had not died. He had successfully completed the diaper change. And there was no point in being negative.
    “All right. Let’s go downstairs and find something on TV.”
    Daphne didn’t argue, so Cooper grabbed her from the bed and jogged downstairs. He found the remote, turned on the television and settled on watching a rerun of a docudrama. Unfortunately, he couldn’t lie on the couch with Daphne. That meant he was back to the rocker. But Daphne wasn’t happy. She squiggled and squirmed as if she wanted to get down. And Cooper supposed she could. The great room was huge and there weren’t a lot of things she could bump into if she rolled. The only problem was that he couldn’t be sure it was clean.
    So he jogged up the stairs again, Daphne on his arm, yanked the spread from his bed, and carried it to the great room. One-handed, he managed to open it on the floor. Then he placed Daphne in its center. On a stroke of genius, he ran to her diaper bag and found a few toys. He tossed them to the blanket beside her. She looked up at him and grinned.
    He grinned back. Success again. He was no longer so cocky that he would criticize any parent. But he had figured out some fairly sticky problems. He knew he wasn’t perfect but he thought he was pretty darned good at this.
    Ultimately, Daphne playedherself out. Without a word or help from Cooper, who had decided to watch television from a prone position on the sofa, she laid her head on the bedspread, made herself comfortable and fell asleep. Also played out from his morning, Cooper fell asleep, too.
    Ten minutes later he heard a scream and launched off the couch as if someone had set off a starting gun. He immediately looked at the blanket where he’d left Daphne and much to his horror she was gone.
    Luckily, she screamed again. Cooper pivoted in the direction of the noise.
    “Oh, my God! Daphne!” he yelped, scrambling over to the section of the room from which her cries and frustrated screams and screeches were coming. She’d somehow gotten wedged between the television stand and a bookcase.
    He caught her up in his arms. “How the heck did you do that?”
    She sniffled and looked away.
    “All right. It’s probably a trade secret. I can respect that. Want some more milk?”
    He figured that if he fed her more of her bottle she would take another nap. He wasn’t sure how she had gotten herself wedged so far away from where he put her, but this time he simply wouldn’t go to sleep. He would watch TV with one eye on her in case she decided to roll again.
    She drank the remainder of the last bottle, dozed off, and continued sleeping when he laid her in the center of the blanket on the floor again. He sighed with relief and went back to his television show. But what seemed like only a few seconds later she was crying. This time he found her wedged between the two chairs.
    He picked her upagain. “Okay. Two times means you haven’t learned some kind of lesson yet. I don’t even know how you’re getting where you’re going, but I’m hoping being trapped twice taught you your lesson.”
    He sat her down on the blanket. She grabbed for a rattle. Cooper went back to TV.
    This time when she howled, he found her on all fours backed into a corner and he suddenly saw what she was doing. “You can only crawl backward!”
    She made a grunting noise while rocking on her knees as if trying to push through the wall behind her.
    “You’ve got to come forward, kid.”
    She screeched with unhappiness.
    Cooper stooped down and moved her right arm forward. “This way.” He thought she would mimic the movement with her other arm and go forward. Instead she simply slid the arm he had moved back to its original position.
    Given that she didn’t appear to be a quick learner and he wasn’t anybody’s teacher, he scooped her from the floor again. Unfortunately, he caught the