Using a hard drive partition that is in use by Time Machine

Hopefully an easy question -

I have an external hard drive being used for Time Machine (under 10.8.1). The Time Machine drive has the standard Backups.backupdb folder, and has 1.2TB of free space available.

I had a hard drive fail recently and I've managed to salvage data from it using Disk Warrior. I need a temporary spot to copy the data from the damaged drive until I can get a replacement.

Am I safe to use that 1.2TB of free space on the Time Machine drive? Or will Time Machine delete anything I put or create on the drive that's not the Backups.backupdb folder? Can you have anything at all in the Time Machine partition?

Cheers!