abconceuponatimeconfessions:

“I still don’t understand what Mr. Gold’s grounds were for taking Ashley’s baby (in our world). It was a deal, but she was completely allowed to change her mind at any point. She didn’t even have to run, the law was on her side and Mr. Gold should have known that. The only thing left was his threat, and while he could press charges for stealing and assault, he still wouldn’t have gotten the baby. Since Sean decided to come back, he’d have their daughter by the time anything with court happened.”

I think the point was that he could do something drastic to make her life much harder, if she had thwarted him. Storybrooke residents have - b/c of the Curse - an inbuilt feeling that they can’t ever really leave, and Gold ‘owns the town’, as Granny puts it. He probably owns the deed to her home and/or Sean’s, and holds enough sway in town that her life could be incredibly difficult, even more so than it was in the episode, if he took against her.

Also: Storybrooke’s a messed-up place, so who’s to say he couldn’t have done something to make her seem like an unfit mother, and taken her baby anyway? The point wasn’t really that the baby would be his, but that it WOULDN’T be hers.

That was how I interpreted it, anyway.