Yes, but it won't be as fast as advertised.
The PCI Express standards mandate proper down-negotiation of the exact PCI Express version being used on any given link to the maximum version supported by both endpoints. This means you can use PCI Express devices for any version of the spec (provided they are properly compliant with the spec) with a mainboard/chipset that uses any other version without having to perform any manual configuration at all.
In your case, this translates to the SSD running at PCI Express 2.0 speeds, with half the lanes it possibly could. This is actually a pretty significant performance hit. PCI-E 4.0 has a max throughput of roughly 1.9 GB per second per lane, while PCI-E 2.0 only gets about 0.5 GB per second per lane. This translates to a peak performance in your case of at most roughly 1/8 of the SSD's rated performance. It will still probably perform far better than a conventional hard drive would, but you may very well get better performance out of a SATA SSD on the same mainboard than you would an NVMe SSD.
You might be able to find a PCI-Express to M.2 adapter that would work, and then plug that into one of the PCI-Express 3.0 slots on the board, but that will only get you up to roughly half the rated performance for the SSD.
One quick final note, always check that the size of M.2 card is compatible with whatever you're using it with. The '2280' means that the SSD you're looking at is 22mm wide (which everything supports) and 80mm long (which not everything supports). In your case, this should fit (based on pictures, the motherboard does indeed have enough room for an 80mm M.2 card), but anything longer would not.
I'd check if that socket is indeed behind the mainboard chipset, and not directly connected to the CPU -- otherwise the CPU and SSD might negotiate a Gen3 link over wires that are only spec'd for Gen2. – Simon Richter – 2019-12-28T20:01:03.863
@SimonRichter The Intel Ark sheet says the Z97 PCH is providing the PCIe 2.0 connectivity. The answer from Peter addresses the negotiation aspect. Still, there is a userful chart in the board's user manual,page 1-19: "M.2 Socket 3 shares bandwidth with PCIEx1_1 & PCIEx1_2 (in PCIE mode) and SATA6G_4 (in SATA mode)" it's probably worth paying attention to which port you plug SATA drives into(if you plan on using a SATA based M.2 drive) or if you're using one of the other PCIe 1x ports.
– Booga Roo – 2019-12-28T20:36:46.677@SimonRichter - due to the way the links train, the actual link rate may well be less than the overall supported speeds; in addition, a gen 2 and gen 3 link are very different (particularly the line coding) which would cause a gen 3 attempt to fail (but it should not even attempt this as the speed advertisement from the gen 2 device would limit the link rate anyway). – Peter Smith – 2019-12-29T11:38:52.920
@PeterSmith, my point was that if that link was a direct connection, no Gen2 device would be involved, and the failure mode would be similar to two gigabit Ethernet cards with just two pairs connected -- they'd negotiate alright, then fall over when trying to actually use the link. – Simon Richter – 2019-12-29T23:57:51.050