Book 3 picks up right after Diamonds in the Rough ended, with Maxime learning that his Zoe has run away. I didn’t know what to expect from Maxime, would he continue with his original plan? Would he flip his shit?
Spoiler, he flipped his shit. Maxime gives up everything to go after Zoe. Mind you he is furious with her, but he is consumed by his need to find his little flower and make sure she is safe. At this point is when Maxime realizes that his plan of marrying Izabella while being with Zoe was the worst thing he could have possibly done to her. He doesn’t know what love is, but she is his obsession, and because she is a good person she would never be satisfied being a man’s mistress.
Zoe goes straight to Damian. She is so eager to see her brother, to reconnect with him, but after meeting him she realizes she can’t put his life in danger. Damian has a wife now, he is having a baby, and she knows if Maxime were to find out she is with him he would use her family to get to her. That is something she will never let happen.
So, Zoe Hart disappears. But then again maybe Zoe Hart had begun to disappear the day Maxime had taken her for his own. Life with him chipped her of her idealistic notion of love bit by bit. Love with Maxime only taught her pain and loss, and she internalizes all of this to become the woman Maxime never wanted her to be.
Cold, unfeeling, and most of all no longer willing to take Maxime’s shit.
Eventually, Maxime does catch up to her. I mean what else would you expect, he was always going to. He threatens her as she expected he would do and Zoe has no choice but to give in. What happens after she returns to him is where the real test of their relationship begins. Maxime no longer has the protection of the mafia, he left all of that behind for Zoe, and Zoe no longer wishes to please Maxime. She will stay with him, but it’ll be on her own terms. The gloves are off for both of them.
Reading about Zoe becoming a successful designer was a balm to my soul. She’d been beaten down so much before, to see her finally achieving her dreams was just what I needed to read. For Maxime, life away from the mafia is hard. His family is not making things easy on him (especially his brother Alexis), and Zoe is slipping away from him. He is being pushed to his limits, but as I read the book I couldn’t get over how…genuine he was. And I hated it! He didn’t get to be genuine after all the stuff he’d did in the previous books, and I think Zoe was of the same mind. She didn’t want to give him a chance but he makes it very hard on her. At the end of the day, she loves him as much as she hates him.
And when everything reaches that inevitable boiling point, love might not be enough to keep them together.
I wish the book was longer. I wish I could have stayed with the characters more, but I’ll take what I get. Charmaine didn’t give them an epilogue held too far in the future, which makes me think we might see them in the upcoming books in the series. I sincerely hope so.
I’ll miss Zoe and Maxime.
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