Why is kotlin timeout not working as it should be

Question

I have been trying to create a decorator for a lambda function in Kotlin. The requirements for the decorator are following:

• The decorator must be able to REPEAT the process passed in the form of lambda function
• The decorator must be able to TIMEOUT after a certain time which will be passed along in the decorator.

This is what I have been able to come up so far:

inline fun <T, R> testDecorator(input: T,
                                timesToRepeat: Int,
                                timeout: Long,
                                crossinline work: (T) -> R): R {
    repeat(timesToRepeat - 1) {
        try {
            return runBlocking {
                  withTimeout(timeout) {
                      work(input)
        }
        } catch (ex: Exception) {
            // Deal with exception
        }
    }
    return work(input)
}

Right now, the work function will only be making a http request but later on I plan to add some more work.

Sample work:

fun sampleWork() {
val client = HttpClient.newBuilder().build();
val request = HttpRequest.newBuilder() .uri(URI.create("some url")) .build(); 
val response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString()); 
// Parse respone
return parsedResponse;
}

The problem is that the timeout is not working as expected and the function only ends after all the processes in the lambda have ended. Can someone tell me what am I missing here?