Your guess is right. As polynomial time reductions are no necessarily linear time reduction, you cannot get from $SAT\in TIME(n^k)$ that $NP\subseteq TIME(n^k)$. This is because if the reduction runs on $O(n^l)$ time, then the problem (which is reduced to $SAT$) will be solve, in general, in$O(n^{kl})$ time and not just $O(n^k)$ time - recall that in the worst case scenario the reduction will produce instances of $SAT$ of size $O(n^l)$.