Goldie doesn't like to admit to thinking about Scrooge—not even to herself. Not when they're outside working or when he's sitting across from her at mealtimes, and even less so when he isn't around. Those nights where physical exhaustion alone cannot put her to sleep and the mind wanders to places she'd rather it not. Like the presence of that moronic miner Scrooge McDuck, dammit.
Lying wide awake, Goldie groans in frustration.
Stupid miner.
As open as he was for the taking, he was proving a bit of a disruption—she just couldn't get him out of her mind. The way he dares to boss her around or criticize her mining skills. The way his muscles flex when he pulls up his sleeves to split wood. The way his normally scowling blue eyes sparkle with warmth when he tells her about his family back in Scotland or listens to her own stories about her childhood. The way her night time fantasies center on him and not the goose egg nugget she was there to snatch. The way one look from him can make her break out in a cold sweat. The way her insides melt when she gets glimpses of the tender man beneath an exterior as frigid and rough as a Klondike winter. The way his innocence and integrity could make her question her entire outlook, reconsider the honest path which had once caused her grief and pain back when she was the sucker and others had done her and her poor family wrong…
After all, life was easy when you looked after yourself and didn't give a damn about the rich idiot who was asking for it. If life had taught Goldie O'Gilt anything, it was that the game was rigged already—might as well not even try to play by the rules. When she thought of how her poor mother had suffered when she was a child because of poverty. All the nights she and her mother stayed up mending for a few quarters that never gave them the life they needed or deserved. The way her poor kid brother sold his childhood to work in a factory, only to be mangled in the God-awful machinery by fourteen. The images of his bent, broken body, and her feelings of despair and helplessness still haunted her dreams as a grown woman. No, she had been perfectly content to believe the worst of humanity to justify herself and the pilfered gold in her secret stash.
Until that damn miner just had to show up. How could one honest man make her think like this? This man who had suffered and been screwed over, yet still continued to believe that honesty and hard work were viable policies in this day and age! She likes to think it's all biological—his good looks and adorable smile making her weak in the knees like any red-blooded woman—but there is the nagging realization that she admires him for his personal code, his gentleman-like conduct in regards to her, his willingness to do things square rather than just his physical assets. Like the gold hidden in these claims, such a person is rare, a thing to be treasured and not thrown away—
Turning over, she screws her eyes shut in defiance, trying to banish that dumb sourdough from her mind so she can get some shuteye and dream about being drenched in gold and diamonds. She has to refocus on what she allowed herself to be kidnapped for: that damn goose egg nugget. Yes, he was cute with his blue eyes and his whiskers. Yes, she could willingly listen to that heavy accent of his all day and never derive any less pleasure from it. But the name of O'Gilt, Dawson City, and every gold reservoir in the world be damned if she was ever going to let him turn her into a swooning, sighing sap!
It's midnight. She still can't sleep. She hears him sigh in the next room over. Apparently he can't sleep either. She wonders what he's dreaming about…
Dammit, she's thinking about him again.
No dice.